Actually, my brother was telling me after he started working as a police officer, the only arrests he was bound by law to make was for outstanding warrents. He could technically let a murder off with a warning. However in reality that doesn’t really happen.
Unfortunately, and will an actual lawyer correct me if I’m off base here, wouldn’t rape shield laws (I think that’s what they’re called–the laws that don’t allow the victim’s past sexual history to be brought up in court as a defense against a rape accusation) come into play here, making the hypothetical case look infinitely more black and white and virtually assuring the boy gets the book thrown at him? Don’t get me wrong, those laws are a good thing and I remember what it was like before them and would never go back, but in this case it seems to me that a well intentioned law would be standing in the way of actual justice.
I don’t want to appear elitist or anything like that, but it’s a simple matter of fact that most likely, any given jury does not, as a whole, have much training in rhetoric and recognising fallacious argumentation, which leaves them rather open to manipulation by better trained individuals, i.e. lawyers – a good lawyer, I’m pretty sure, can make the average jury believe and/or doubt pretty much anything – just look at some of the things people will believe even without being prompted (actually, I’ve always had some general criticism for the jury system based on this, but it would be beyond the scope of this thread to go further into that).
So I think imposing some limits on their freedom of decision is only reasonable, and necessary for consistent law enforcement.
No, not at all, and I’ll tell you why. As background: My husband loves the idea of law. Even though he majored in computer science, he always took poli-sci major-oriented government and history classes as electives, he reads about it, etc.
So, when he got called up for jury duty a couple of years ago, he was kind of excited about getting to be involved in the justice system. He ended up on a robbery case with a jury that completely ignored the overwhelming evidence against the guy, completely bought the defense’s case that the local police force was “conspiring” against the guy, despite a complete lack of evidence, and discussed their astrological signs and what it meant that they were all on the jury while my husband worked to convince them to at least convict him on one of the minor charges (they weren’t budging on anything else).
He was completely disillusioned and says he’ll tell them anything to avoid jury duty again. I still feel terrible for him about that; I’ve rarely seen him that disheartened about anything.
And you think these yahoos should be interpreting the laws, too? I think you don’t get out enough and maybe don’t realize what utter idiots people are.
Forbidding courts from doing so is one of the first thing that was done in France after the revolution. There was a saying at the time that went like “May God protect us from the equity of courts” (Dieu nous preserve de l’équité des parlements).
Courts were previously allowed to rule “in equity”, that is to set apart a law in a particular case if its enforcement would have resulted in an obviously unjust ruling, assumed not to be intended by the legislator.
The obvious problem was that different courts or judges might have vastly different opinions about what the spirit of the law is and about what is just or unjust. The net result being that court rulings were unpredictable and inconsistent, as law and precedents might or might not be discarded, at the court’s whim.
Also, it might not always work out the way you would expect, especially for sensitive and hotly debated issues. Actually, you’d never know how it is going work out.
This ball should be in the camp of the legislator and of the prosecution, not the courts
I believe I said the law, a parent, or someone should have stopped that relationship. You may have a different opinion and that’s your right but to me a 14 year old boy and a 12 year old girl is just flat wrong. When I was fourteen, I had my own car while twelve year old girls were still more or less playing with dolls experimenting with make up.
OK, I haven’t read this entire thread yet; but I wanted to point out the absurdity of your post. Just because they’ve been boyfriend and girlfriend for four years, doesn’t mean they had sex on their first date. I think point being made (and I think it’s it’s still a bad point, by the way) is that they’ve had a relationship for a long time. Based on the length of their relationship would it necessarily be a bad thing that they had sex, even if it was the first time?
Legalism in any form (going by the letter) is a horrible way to live, leads to ridicules things like 9 warning stickers on a ladder, adds much expense to products and services, and really restricts humanity to each and every move you make must be assumed ‘reasonable action’ or else you are at fault, though it is not reasonable for humans to act totally reasonable 100% of the time.
I don’t think the judicial system is blind to the spirit of the law. This is even allowed for in the letter of it by giving judges and juries a range of possible sentences for various crimes and discretion in sentencing. It also allows certain charges to be dropped/dismissed even when the accused is guilty of them in order to plead to a lesser charge (plea bargaining). It’s pretty routine really.
Do rape shield laws come into affect for purely statutory rape such as the example? Could the defense call on the victim as a cooperative witness? She could establish that she did not tell the suspect her age and that she was the aggressor. If she does this voluntarily, I do not think the rape shield laws would come into play.
See now, I don’t really know–but I have seen statutory rape laws get crazy ridiculous in some jurisdictions. For example, back in the mid '70s I married at sixteen while already pregnant. It was legal in California with parental consent at the time. My ex-husband was nineteen. Nowadays my understanding is that in California it’s still legal to marry when under eighteen, at least according to this site. According to the same site, if I were in the same situation today in Oregon where I currently live I wouldn’t be allowed to marry under any circumstance until I turned seventeen.
Now as I understand statutory rape laws, they’re predicated on the person under the age of majority being unable to consent to sex. In most states parents can give consent for their minor child to marry, which one assumes means they will indeed be having sex. However, if the minor is sexually active but unmarried, parental consent doesn’t have any force and a prosecutor can unilaterally decide, even if both parties and their parents disagree, to prosecute the statutory rape charge independent of the choices of the actual principals involved.
So this isn’t quite the same thing as the rape shield laws, but has the same effect. Even if that fifteen year old were an experienced hooker with an incredibly sincere fake ID who was a hostile witness against her virginal paramour (let’s make it even more fun and assume the boy met her at a church social and was totally unaware of her night job) it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference–if the DA was gung-ho to pursue the case it would be pursued and a jury would be required to convict because the bare facts of the case–eighteen year old dick goes into fifteen year old pussy–insist that a crime has been committed.
Statutory rape laws are one area where a gigantic amount of common sense and reform needs to be applied. According to these laws, had they been extant when I was a teenager, my children could have been made bastards, their father a convicted felon and registered sex offender, our family would never have had a chance to prosper–and for what? To “protect” a sexually active girl who’d been doing the nasty all on her own since fifteen, even though she neither needed nor wanted such “protection?” I’d say the cure was infinitely worse than the disease.
It seems to me that most statutory rape convictions are much more about making vindictive parents and gung-ho, “tough on crime” prosecutors happy than by shielding the vulnerable from exploitation.
I don’t care if they waited until he was eighteen and she was sixteen to have sex; what I do believe and will continue to believe is that a fourteen year old boy had no business being involved with a twelve year old girl in sort of dating and/or romantic or going steady arrangement. That’s all; that’s my opinion; YMMV. I would wonder quite seriously if the fourteen year old boy was unable, for whatever reason, to be interested or to have an interest in a girl nearer his own age.
Those writing the laws are usually not that stupid (I am making no comment as to there wisdom). Usually a law will spell out exactly what the definitions mean. These definitions are part of the code. For example in the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Code (NJSA Title 39) many of the laws will use the term “motor vehicle”. There is a section that has a very specific definition to rule out any confusion like you have above.
In reality it is not true. Yes there are manditory arrests. Depending on the state the manditory arrests usually include warrants and certain domestic violence crimes. Though it is not listed under manditory arrests you still have an obligation to arrest (or at the very least hold for further investigation) if there is probable casue. Letting a murderer go with a warning would be malfeasance which is a crime. Malfeasance is “the doing of an act which an officer had no legal right to do at all and that when an officer, through ignorance, inattention, or malice, does that which they have no legal right to do at all, or acts without any authority whatsoever, or exceeds, ignores, or abuses their powers, they are guilty of malfeasance.”
That is a whole other issue. This has been a discussion of criminal law. Civil law is much different.