Xequecal wrote:
My entire initial point was that in Arizona you can be required to prove consent.
Your entire initial point that I just got done quoting had nothing to do with Arizona. All the stuff about Arizona, and for that matter, percentages of states with felonies was a distraction from your intital point which was about the 2nd post in the thread. My mistake was in foolishly entertaining this instead of focusing on your original untenable position that there are widespread actual instances of teenagers convicted of not just any old sex offense but
aggravated rape, solely becuase of minor age differences - one which you have not even begun to defend.
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You don't seem to be disagreeing with me at all. If you have sex with someone under 18 in Arizona, you can be charged with rape. If you are, at that point you must prove that your partner consented in order to satisfy the affirmative defense and be acquitted on the rape charge.
Proving consent isn't hard at all in the absence of evidence of lack of consent, and you won't be charged with "Rape"; you'll be charged with "sexual conduct with a minor" which is a class 6 felony. It is not even remotely equivalent to aggravated rape.
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Proving consent, is, well, pretty much impossible unless the "victim" flat out admits in court that it was consensual.
Except for the fact that a charge of "sexual conduct with a minor" rather than "rape" is, itself, a tacit stipulation by the prosecution that it was consensual. Furthermore, putting the "victim" on the stand is going to expose her to the defense attorney, so if she's been told "you better say it was rape" it's going to be pretty hard for a teenager to hold to that int he face of determined cross-examination. Teenagers are not terribly resistant to interrogation.
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We did this in the New Zealand thread where people agreed that a prove consent requirement would lead to vindictive women crying rape and leave the man up a creek with no way to defend himself.
And in that case the prosecution would not tacitly have admitted consent already.
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Well, in Arizona, teenagers can do this and the exact same problem happens.
No, it doesn't. There would be no need for the "sexual conduct with a minor" charge if it were.
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If the girl cries rape, or even is just pressured by her parents into keeping quiet, the boy is instantly guilty.
It's funny how hard it is to convict if the alleged victim "keeps quiet". This is especially true in juvenile courts which are set up specifically to add protection for juvenile defendants.
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Most states have laws that prohibit rape defendants from questioning the alleged victim about their sexual activity,[ so the boy's lawyers can't even put the girl on the stand and ask her to testify under oath as to whether the conduct was consentual or not.
Yes they can. Those laws pertain to her sexual history. They defense can ask any question they want about the sex act in question. Furthermore, rape shield laws don't protect against questioning about history when it directly goes to the act in question, and a sudden accusation of rape out of the blue just because 2 kids got caught **** certainly arouses that suspicion. All that has to be weighed against the general reluctance of courts to permanently damage the prospects of teen defendants unless its unavoidable.
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As a result, he can't prove consent and the prosecutor has a 100% slam dunk case if he decides to prosecute, because the defendant is now required to prove something that he basically can't.
Nope. Wrong. He admitted it was consensual as soon as he didn't charge based on the nonconsensual in the first place.
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I will freely admit that I did not have any specific cases in mind when I made the initial post, I merely figured that, hey, 100+ million people are living in states where this conduct is a felony, it's probably happened at least like a half-dozen times where over-protective or over-religious parents made a huge stink about their precious daughter getting violated and managed to convince a bored or crusading prosecutor to actually file charges.
So in other words you made an outrageous claim based on nothing more than your own anti-religious bigotry and then backpedalled to "well it's theoretically a felony in some states" because it was ridiculous. I must be slipping to have fallen for that for so many posts.
Here's a clue - the conservatives you're worrying about don't exist. They're the Democrat propaganda version of a conservative. Similarly, there is no such thing as "overly religious". You, as a non-religious person, are not in a position to determine what's an ok amount of religion and what isn't.
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I mean, 18/17 prosecutions happened so many times that it eventually got major media attention and most states had to amend their laws to prevent it, why would 16/15 be any different?
Because they'd already learned their lesson, and becuase 16 year olds automatically go to juvenile court?
Furthermore, even in the 18/17 case, they didn't meet your own original criteria - the same charge as the woman in the OP. You don't seem to get that all felonies are not created equal. There are degrees of felonies and degrees of sex offenses and they vary greatly. This charge carries a 20-year maximum sentence
per count.
You don't seem to grasp just how outrageous your initial claim was.