Friday, March 27, 2009

Racy pictures


It's a girl in 1910 bathing suit, quite daring for the time. Ahh, but time marches on. Could William Blackstone visit now, he'd flip his powdered wig to see what's become of law. He'd identify the root cause immediately: we've let popular passions confuse the role of intent in the justice process.

The law can only work by remaining a low-temp science. This because a courtroom is often filled with passions; the accused, the victims. Someone must remain detached. That has been the truth of the justice process since long before cell phones. In bringing charges, we are only to consider a specific act and its effect.

It's wrong to charge as Child pornographers, teenagers who willingly exchange racy photographs with other teenagers. The act has nothing to do with Child pornography laws, since they were enacted to protect children from sexual exploitation at the hands of adults. If the photos can be shown to have been extracted by the manipulation of an adult, that adult may be charged, but not the child. In all the cases that have emerged so far, that appears not to be the case.
Similarly, the effects of these immodest acts seems to be a lot of giggling teenage boys, which is nothing new.

I hope the DA's bringing these charges will soon get a proper response from the electorate.

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