I see this as being a real problem with our court system. The judge has way too much power to manipulate the case by choosing what to allow and what not to allow. The jury doesn’t really get to hear the whole story, but only what the judge decides the jury should hear. This reduces the jury to window-dressing in a show trial, being led by the nose to deliver a verdict that the judge had pre-determined.
There was a high-profile pot-growing case in California some years ago, in which this became a near-scandal. City of Santa Cruz operated medical pot dispensaries, and contracted with a private grower to provide the pot. Feds, not recognizing State or local laws, busted the grower. Grower wanted to tell the jury that the city had contracted with him to grow pot. Judge (in Federal court) disallowed that as not being relevant. This was very controversial and publicly argued during the trial in the media, but the jury didn’t know that.
Jury convicted. Afterward, when they read the newspapers and learned of the controversy, several jurors felt that they had been deceived and misled by the court, and publicly attempted to repudiate their verdict. Of course, jurors can’t change their verdict after the fact like that. One or two of them even publicly announced that they were writing a book on the subject, based on their notes and recollections from the trial. It was widely suspected that they were doing this solely to force the judge to declare (after the fact) a mis-trial, or to give the defendant fodder for his appeal. It didn’t fly.
Epilogue: Eventually, the judge sentenced the grower to time already served (I don’t know how long that was), plus one day. This was widely viewed in the media as being a repudiation of the guilty verdict.
As set out in the OP, Guilty. He had sex with her, she was way underage, case closed. I’d vote that way regardless of whether I was in a strict liability jurisdiction or not.
I’d hope the judge would give a suspended sentence and no sex offender registration, but I believe that’s completely out of my hands as a juror, right?
Somewhat related real life example. Did the men who did porn with Tracy Lords get charged with anything? Seems like her story closely matches the op as she used a fake id to start in the porn industry at 15.
But here: In the course of the investigation, they witnessed Gottesman giving acknowledgement of prior knowledge that Lords was underage during the making of those movies.
The man a) saw her birth certificate and KNEW her age; and b) he has power over her. She’s very vulnerable because she has no other resources and her lack of maturity may have lead to her seeking comfort. I have no problem with age disparities (although 14 is pushing it quite a bit) but the imbalance of power plus the age issue is a situation where a gentleman should have enough integrity to say NO now is not a good time, perhaps in a bit when you get settled and secure.
I donno. I think it would be much easier to tell with the brightest kids rather than ones who come from screwed up circumstances. Tom is only 20 himself and if he has had problems himself, it may be possible for him to think that she’s just dumb in some areas.
My cousin got hooked up with a homeless, single mother he met in a bar, they went back to his hotel and then essentially moved in together. She was 26, going on 13. (He later invited me to join them and some of her friends in sex party at their place, but I declined.)
This was the same cousin who as a 20-year-old sailor met a [del]prostitute[/del] bar girl (16) in the Philippines, paid the tab to let her leave the bar and they went back to her place. He proposed to her that night because “God” told him to. It turns out she was pregnant with another navy boy’s child and needed some stability.
I’ve met plenty of immature 20-year-olds, so it may be possible for him to not know.
I don’t know how I’d vote. In a real court case, we would be given conflicting arguments and the prosecutor would likely have Claire testifying in a little girl’s dress looking like she’s 12. I’d be staring daggers at Tom wondering why hell he couldn’t have been able to tell.
If you’re suggesting that you do, I think you’ll find you’re by far in the minority on this board. There is nothing wrong with safe, consensual sex regardless of the relationship between the two people having it so long as the character of this relationship does not compromise the ability to give consent.
Note that that case involved rape of a child under 13, pursuant to s5 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003. The age makes a difference.
There are jurisdictions (such as mine) where a reasonable mistake by the accused might be available for a child in the years of adolescence but still under the age of consent (and it is a matter for local lawmakers about who bears the onus in this sort of situation, and where the age boundaries are). However, this provision allowing for the possibility of mistake does not arise for children under the age of adolescence because biology makes it practically impossible to make a genuine mistake about the age of pre-pubescent children. One can cavil at the point where that lower boundary excluding mistake should be, but the fact that there seems to be one in the UK (set at 13) is not surprising.
13 is not the age of consent in the UK, and that case may merely reflect ideas I mentioned above rather than be of universal application, including in the range where the complainant is much closer 16 years.
That conclusion is supported by the offence created in s9 (text below), which covers cases of children under 16. There, there is no doubt that an element of the offence is proof that the accused did not reasonably believe the child was over 16, if the child is in the range from 13-16.
9 (1)A person aged 18 or over (A) commits an offence if—
(a)he intentionally touches another person (B),
(b)the touching is sexual, and
(c)either—
(i)B is under 16 and A does not reasonably believe that B is 16 or over, or
I have served on a jury, and everyone on the jury had a high school diploma. Five people had college degrees, and two had graduate degrees.
In this particular case, the defense did not intend to put on a case, and was counting on the prosecution being weak. The defense lawyer examined potential jurors, and asked for the dismissal of anyone who did not fully understand that the principle of “innocent until proved guilty” meant that the defense did not have to do anything. The jurors did not have to hear “both sides” so to speak, and any potential juror who couldn’t grasp that, or said they wanted to hear “both sides,” got dismissed. Many of the less-educated people were dismissed for that reason.
So we had a jury of people who were intelligent, and responsible, civic-minded people who all made a great effort to get along with one another out of respect for the process. It was about as pleasant an experience as it could have possibly been.
There were some assholes in the jury pool trying to get themselves dismissed, and I’m glad they did. Maybe they went home and told their friends they got dismissed for being smart, but they got dismissed for one of two things-- either blatantly lying, or just being such sheer assholes that they would clearly stall the process and cause general discord. One was both. We were glad not to have them.
And FWIW, I have a cousin who works for the Chicago state’s attorney’s office. I asked him once if he looks for uneducated people as jurors, and he gave me an unequivocal “No.” Exactly what he looks for varies by case, but in general, he likes educated people who understand the evidence; however, he doesn’t like show-offs who think they are smarter than anyone else, including people who think they know more about law than the lawyers; DNA than the expert witnesses, etc.; because they tend to taint the jury by spouting off a lot of extraneous nonsense during deliberations, and don’t stick to the judge’s instructions.
This sort of cynicism oughtn’t go unchallenged. I have tried a very great many jury trials. I have prosecuted, rather than defended. And neither I nor the defence counsel I know have wanted dullards on the jury. We each fear that dullards might be swayed by the showmanship “bells and whistles” stuff of the other. We NEED people who can pay close attention to matters of intricate detail, recognise subtle distinctions, etc.
What we don’t want is people whose intelligence is distorted into thinking themselves the cleverest person in the room. There are a great many people who have an otherwise laudable skill set that they think will allow them to solve problems outside the area of their expertise, and they have a habit of bringing that to trials.
An example: I would not want Richard Dawkins on a jury, but not merely because he is intelligent.
He tells a story in one of his books about a time when he was on a jury and he “cracked the case” (so he thought) by reference to his scientific expertise. I can’t remember the details, but I recall he was applying mathematical tools to the question of proof, or some such. (It certainly was not of the low order of his simply knowing more about the behaviour of some particular bug than the expert witnesses.)
As he told the story, he was baffled that people did not get his ideas, and he interpreted this as the legal system being too dumb. He blithely assumed his analysis was both correct and appropriate to the forum.
Not so. Things like Bayesian analyses don’t work in uncontrolled environments like jury trials, where attaching numbers to likelihoods is not empirically justifiable. It creates the illusion but not the substance of scienciness.
Similarly, the concept of “proof” does not mean the same thing in a criminal trial as it did to Dawkins.
The point I make is that we want smart people, not smart-arses. I couldn’t resist this line, although I make apology to Dawkins who is implied caught by that. He is not a smart-arse, but he exemplifies that class of person who, through intelligence, overgeneralises their expertise.
I don’t know that intelligent or educated people are always passed over, but I do know that in over ten years in grad school, between about 50 grad students and 50 faculty in my department, not one of us was ever selected to be on a jury. That’s enough to very strongly suggest that there’s some significant bias against selecting physicists, at least.
As for the case at hand, I think that even most strict liability jurisdictions will allow something as definitive as seeing a birth certificate as a defense. If that’s the case, then the only question is whether I believe the facts as they were presented.
That said, however, if I were in a jurisdiction which did not allow that as a defense, then I would vote to convict. The jury’s job is to determine the facts of the case. The proper avenue for justice in a case like this is not for the jury to decide contrary to the facts; it is for the judge to be lenient in the sentencing, or for the DA to decline to prosecute, or for the legislature to change the law, or for the governor to pardon the defendant.
My suspicious nature would probably take over at some point, because that story does not ad up.
I can see offering a couch to someone for a few days, but why is he helping a stranger sett up a bank account?
In other words . . . this grown ass man meets a girl on a buss. He knows the following:
She is travelling to a town where she has no friends or family, no job, and is not enrolled in higher education.
She crashes on his couch for days, a complete stranger, and makes no plans to find a permanent place to live.
She does not have a bank account, and needs him, a random stranger, to help her, and lets him see her birth sertificate while doing so. In other words, he knows she is either too stupid or trusting to worry about identity theft, or has another reason not to care about her personal details.
She has no past, no-one knows her, she has no friends or family. No-one calls her, she skypes no-one, she has no visible imprint in the world around her.
´
Honestly, if he had just run into her on the buss, brought her home for the night and hung out with her the next day, I’d be inclined to believe him. But this story has way to many strange details. He is either the stupidest man alive, or something very fishy is going on. I have no idea what verdict I’d give, honestly. Why on earth didn’t he at least think “run-away criminal”, if not “14-year-old”? Is he developmentally delayed? Did he think she was?
No, obviously not an actual tiny dress; a dress which makes her seem like a little girl.
Back when I was in high school there was a guy who could look 35 and the police would use him to see if he could buy beer without getting carded. Then if it went to court, they’d dress him up so he looked like a typical teen.
No part of government is perfect. The supreme court has had some doozies such as dread scott and Wickard v. Filburn. The executive has made lots of bad calls such as the Vietnam war, the trail of tears, Iran Contra and many others. Tons of bad laws have been passed by congress. Jury nullification is the only direct check on government actions that citizens can exercise and I think it is a good thing that they can.
Oh absolutely. The issue in R v G was that the Crown accepted that the accused/appellant had a reasonable belief in age (the victim said that she was 15) and the Lords said that was irrelevant. It basically extended the scope strict liability beyond regulatory offences and went against the traditional construction rules, which was to read in *mens rea **unless specifically barred.
*Or more accurately Lord Hope, mens rea was limited to deliberate penetration and did not extend to age.
Not even a smidgen guilty. Sorry for having wasted the defendant’s time.
Yes, she is under age. But there is no intent to break the law here. There is no indifference to the law here. He has seen what he reasonably believes is her birth certificate. HE has acted respectfully and responsibly. Other than being a member of her immediate family, there is no way he could have known she had deceived him. He is an innocent victim here.