Discussion History Film / TheAvengers2012

With all due respect, you\\\'re a cretin. Your argument fails basic logic and wouldn\\\'t stand up in court. A person has only one mind, and thus is one single legal entity, a fact that is so obvious that it normally goes without saying; clearly you cannot split a person into multiple \\\"persons\\\" and charge one of these hypothetical \\\"persons\\\" with stealing the property of another of them. Now, onto the issue of consent. If a person takes a photograph of somebody, then the act requires consent on the part of the subject. However, if they are the subject of their own photograph, you can\\\'t consider that consent independently of the act of taking the photograph, since that would be effectively changing one person into two; so, the act of taking the photograph and consenting to it being taken become one and the same. This is where your argument breaks down completely: asserting that a child was responsible for X but not Y, when X and Y are the same action is equivalent to saying \\\"X is not X\\\", which is a logically meaningless statement and falls foul of the Doctrine of Absurdity. Since the law states that a child cannot consent to being photographed, the only valid conclusion to draw is that the child cannot be held responsible for the act of photographing themselves, because if they were, that would imply they had given consent (which they cannot do). Since the entire basis of the law, and its exclusion from the First Amendment, revolves around this inability of children to give consent, chances of a court finding that the child had given consent, but was still guilty of a crime, are next to zero, and would open the floodgates to a whole slew of potential defenses.

HOWEVER, I still second the removal of this section, for a completely different reason; it\\\'s an UrbanLegend. Despite the media outcry over the past two years about this, I\\\'ve yet to see a single case anywhere near as bad as described. One case was falsely reported by several news outlets as teenagers in PA being placed on the sex offenders registry for sexting, when in actual fact nothing had happened yet and the article was only referring to the theoretical worst case scenario (as it happens, the prosecutor was blocked from even filing charges by a federal court). The only times jail time and/or SO registration have been given as sentence for sexting have been in cases involving adults. As far as children are concerned, every case I\\\'ve seen has been tried in juvenile/family court, and/or ended with a plea bargain or charges dropped altogether. Most prosecutors seem to be filing charges of harassment, distribution of harmful material, or misuse of electronic communications; charges of child pornography, if filed, are typically just used to push a plea bargain or educational program. Sentences given vary, but are nothing like the kinds of sentences given to adults committing sexual offenses, and involve curfews, probation, and counseling rather than prison and registration. Even the most controversial and widely criticized cases are nowhere near as bad as the media seems to suggest; one young adult who was placed on the SO registry was only placed there because his victim\\\'s father pressed the district attorney into withdrawing a plea bargain that would have avoided it - and he was an adult; the underage girl who had sent him pictures of herself in the first place was not charged. Which brings me to another important point, which is that most cases that end up in court at all are cases involving malicious intent; usually where a third party is either using a photo to harass someone or mass-distributing it. There\\\'s a good reason for that: many prosecutors won\\\'t even look at a case unless there\\\'s some level of malice involved. Also contrary to what some news articles seem to imply, very few children are charged with producing images of only themselves (there are exceptions, but they\\\'re a minority), and nobody has been convicted solely on that ground (in A.H. v. State, the defendants were found delinquent on charges of possessing images of each other, not themselves, after having each filed a complaint against the other). The vast majority of sexting cases don\\\'t even make it to court, let alone sentencing.

The typically sensationalistic media is blowing things out of all proportion by talking about what *could technically* happen (and even that\\\'s debatable, since there are several unresolved constitutional problems involved), rather than what usually does. To put this approach in perspective, consider that the average person breaks a number of laws every day, often without even realizing it, and could *technically* be subjected to some relatively severe punishment, but they aren\\\'t. Regardless of the theoretical penalties, in practice sexting by teenagers is treated not unlike underage drinking.

That\\\'s not likely to change either, because parents make up a significant proportion of voters, and inflicting disproportionate sentences for minor juvenile mistakes made by their children is not going to go down well. It\\\'s already happened: one district attorney who caused a nationwide controversy by being foolish enough to actually try persuing child pornography charges against girls who\\\'d photographed themselves (and not the people spreading the pictures and harrassing them) lost his job the same year - and he\\\'d been DA for 20 years, so I think it\\\'s safe to assume the constellation does imply causation in this case.