Xequecal wrote:
No, I really didn't. I went down the page and listed off the states that specifically made 16/15 illegal. Even if you are correct that the Alabama provision is unenforceable, (I'm not so sure about this, Lawrence v. Texas refers to "consenting adults" which might not apply to teenagers) you can see that I did not arrive at the conclusion I did just by looking at the age of consent. There is actually a law on the books there that specifically makes it a felony. There is one for the other 16 states that I listed as well.
It does apply to teenagers; the majority opinion was that the law violated substantive due process rights. Everyone has substantive due process rights, not just adults, so it applies to teenagers, pedantic nitpicking of the wording notwithstanding.
Furthermore, you didn't even mention that law until AFTER I'd already demonstrated that the law that
is still enforcable had an age exception so your protests are rather hollow.
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I don't think this is how it works.
It doesn't matter if you don't think that's how it works. That IS how it works. It's not up for debate.
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If your license is suspended, it's illegal to drive. If you are arrested for driving with a suspended license, the burden of proof is on you to prove that there was an emergency and that no one else was reasonably available. If you can't prove both things, the affirmative defense fails and you get convicted. The state is not required to prove that an emergency did not occur in order to convict you, you have to prove it to get off.
I didn't say they did. I said that they have to prove that A) you were, in fact, driving and B) that your license was, in fact, lawfully suspended. Those facts are both easy to prove, but if they couldn't then the state would fail to establish guilt beyond reasonable doubt. All you really did was restate exactly what I said, except that you skipped straight from "arrest" to "the defendant has to prove", ignoring the burden of the state to prove the offense was committed in the first place.
You topped it off by claiming the state didn't have a positive burden to disprove the affirmative defense, which was not what I said. So once again, it's irrelevant how you think it works. I told you how it works, and I'm not just making it up. I was taught how it works in a formal setting and passed an exam that contained this topic.
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Similarly, in Arizona, it's illegal to have sex with anyone under 18. If you can prove that you were within 24 months of your partner, your partner was over 15, and that the conduct was consentual, you satisfy the affirmative defense and get off for the otherwise illegal conduct. If you can't prove all three things, your affirmative defense fails and you're convicted.
And this does not change the fact that the state has to prove the ages of the people and that sex did, in fact, occur. The fact remains however that an affirmative defense makes an act "not a crime". Whether you win a case by the state failing to prove beyond a reasonable doubt or by affirmative defense an acquittal is the end result.
Most officers and prosecutors won't arrest or won't charge if they are highly confident the affirmative defense would be met in court because it's a waste of time to do so. I don't know what you think you're explaining to me here other than affirming that you're sort of grasping how this works.
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The only claim I made before providing the list was that 40% of the US population lives in a state where this is a felony. Do you disagree that at least 40% of the US population resides within those 15 states? Also, if you want me to actually cite it, here you go. This site lists all the relevant laws for every state, you can easily check each one.
This is not in fact what you claimed; prior to that you made generalized claims of terrible injustices because of these laws and related them to some undefined conservative agenda. You only made more specific claims when pressed.
http://aspe.hhs.gov/report/state-lawsQuote:
We did Alabama already, go down to Delaware, the next one I listed:
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Children under 16 years of age are unable to consent to sexual intercourse regardless of the age of the defendant.
Click on the state to open it and it shows all the relevant offenses. 2nd degree unlawful sexual contact has no close in age exemption.
Technically no it doesn't - it also doesn't have an exemption if BOTH parties are under 16 so while you're technically correct there's another problem with that law - if both parties are under 16 each has assaulted the other. This can't work - a person who commits sexual assault has to be competent to consent themselves at the time the other one is assaulted.
Now, go down to Florida:
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Lewd or lascivious molestation with someone less than 16 years of age where the defendant is less than 18 years of age.
Florida even has a specific, seperate crime for the specific case of under 18 having sex with under 16. You can't possibly claim there's an exception here.
Yes actually I can because there's a new law in Florida passed in 2007 that allows petition if the victim was at least 14 and the offender was no more than 4 years their senior. So, while in theory a 16 year old could still be convicted of raping a 15 year old based solely on age in practice this would never occur:
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A new law passed in 2007 stated that persons convicted of statutory rape may be removed from the sex offender list if they were no more than four years older than their victims, had only the statutory rape offense on their records, and had victims aged 14-17.[33]
Criminal records in general are expunged at 18, so the 16 year could, even with other criminal records, petition to have the sex offender status removed. This renders the entire exercise of trying to get a conviction in juvenile court moot in all but the most extreme of circumstances.
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Now we can go down to Illinois. I don't think I need to quote it again, you can click on it right there. All sex with someone under 17 is defined as criminal sexual abuse, there are no exceptions. Now, this is far more broad than my initial claim, but 16/15 is still a crime here.
The problem being that it's a crime in both directions if we strictly read the law. Technically the law reads this way; in practice the you can't convict 2 juveniles of sexually assaulting one another this way. In the trial of either, the other is assumed to be unable to consent due to their age, but once that person switches places and becomes the defendant, the argument that they assaulted the other person contains an assumption of consent - you can't non-consensually assault someone; we call that an "accident".
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Idaho considers all intercourse with a woman under 18 to be rape. Not only do they have the 16/15 problem, they also still have the 18/17 problem that you claim has been eradicated.
Which is unenforceable under Lawrence v. Texas - it's just a reverse of the Alabama situation; in this case heterosexual sex is criminalized to a greater degree than homosexual, rather than a lesser. The same legal principles apply. Lawrence v. Texas was a very broad decision that had wide-ranging effects beyond the immediate. For example, it applied to Texas but it caused the USSC to order a review in a Kansas case the very next day, which ultimately resulted in another law being vacated.
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Even worse, they've actually codified the sexism into their laws. In Idaho, the male always being guilty isn't just a matter of who gets prosecuted, it's actually a matter of law. 18/17 is legal when the woman is older but rape when the male is.
Lawrence v. Texas. The legal principle is the same, just the discrimination is working in the opposite direction - plus as you say it discriminates against males which would add even more weight against it if re-tested in court.
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Now, we can check out Kansas. You'll notice that like Florida they have a seperate crime for when the ages are close. Maybe I was wrong? Well, no, this page cites every law, so you can easily go check and see that the specific crime that applies is
still a felony.You can feel free to check the remainder of the 15 states I listed.
At least one of the Kansas statutes falls under Lawrence v. Texas. As for the others, all have the 15/15 problem which, while different than what you cited makes the PRACTICAL application of 15/16 problematic as well, and the law in Kansas lowers the penalty for offenders under 19 years old.
Let's go back to your original claim because in addition to finding
at best some states where it's technically a problem but also run into the problem that the same law creates a paradoxical situation where being a victim can also make a child an offender, this is what you claimed:
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This is pretty shitty, but IMHO this one isolated incident of injustice pales in comparison to the multiple cases of 16 year olds tried as adults on similarly severe rape charges for having sex with their 15 year old girlfriends. Regardless of whether you think it's appropriate for 16 year olds to have sex, 10+ year rape charges for the "crime" of sometimes being a few weeks older are absolutely insane.
You've moved the goalposts since then to merely pedantically arguing that in some states a felony is theoretically possible.
Your original claim was
A) Multiple actual cases
B) 16 year olds
C) tried as adults
D) similar charges - aggravated sexual assault, or aggravated rape. The charge she got was the most severe sexual assault charge possible in NJ, not some middling felony. She can get 40 years.
The last is critical. The point you raised was not "can they be charged with any crime at all?" or even "can they be charged with a felony" but that they are tried as adults simply for having consensual sex with a few weeks (or I'll even except several months) of age difference.
So really, no the fact is that you don't have a single example from any state because even if you are technically right that it might be theoretically possible, the fact is that in actual reality a 16 year old is basically never going to get charged with aggravated rape/aggravated sexual assault/insert state name for crime here simply for banging his willing 15 year old girlfriend/boyfriend.
What you did was make an outrageous initial claim and then gently move the goalposts back to what's technically possible under given state laws, while disregarding your own initial conditions of actual cases, severity, and trying juveniles as adults.
At best you've proven that some states have poorly written laws.