Maurice Washington Faces Charges

Moiraine said:
The thing that annoys me the most about this whole thing is child porn laws are meant to protect kids, and this incident is not evidence that Washington is pedophile or that he’s gonna go around pursuing 15 year olds as an adult. She was his ex girlfriend, he was 15/16 when he got the video. I would be okay with some kind of legal punishment, like for the revenge porn, but there needs to be something different than being registered as a sex offender for the child porn charge when it’s already highly unlikely the person is going to do the same thing again.
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This x1000. I think everyone knows what he did was wrong and deserving of legal punishment, but child pornography is too far for this circumstance. Now you have buff fans on their message board calling Maurice a pedophile and I'm sure they aren't the only ones, but that is entirely unfair to him and its all because of sensationalist headlines.

 
Nebfanatic said:
This x1000. I think everyone knows what he did was wrong and deserving of legal punishment, but child pornography is too far for this circumstance. Now you have buff fans on their message board calling Maurice a pedophile and I'm sure they aren't the only ones, but that is entirely unfair to him and its all because of sensationalist headlines.
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It's hard to blame it on sensationalist headlines when Mo's been charged with a felony count of child pornography. That's the state of things whether you agree with the charge or not.

 
Moiraine said:
The thing that annoys me the most about this whole thing is child porn laws are meant to protect kids, and this incident is not evidence that Washington is pedophile or that he’s gonna go around pursuing 15 year olds as an adult. She was his ex girlfriend, he was 15/16 when he got the video. I would be okay with some kind of legal punishment, like for the revenge porn, but there needs to be something different than being registered as a sex offender for the child porn charge when it’s already highly unlikely the person is going to do the same thing again.
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they screwed up when the incident occurred. now they are trying to rectify the problem. they should have done considerably more back then. and the child porn charge is most likely being used just to make sure he receives some sort of punishment if he pleads down.

 
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RedDenver said:
It's hard to blame it on sensationalist headlines when Mo's been charged with a felony count of child pornography. That's the state of things whether you agree with the charge or not.
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Yea no. Sure he is charged with that but he is also charged with revenge porn no? No mention of that charge on many articles. I've read multiple articles that paint this in the light we let a pedo play Saturday and its poor journalism.

 
Nebfanatic said:
Yea no. Sure he is charged with that but he is also charged with revenge porn no? No mention of that charge on many articles. I've read multiple articles that paint this in the light we let a pedo play Saturday and its poor journalism.
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So you're saying the headlines should have focused more on the misdemeanor charge and less on the felony charge?

There's a lot of poor journalism out there, so I won't defend that. And I agree with you that there's articles that do a poor job of articulating the issues here, but you were talking about the headlines.

 
RedDenver said:
So you're saying the headlines should have focused more on the misdemeanor charge and less on the felony charge?

There's a lot of poor journalism out there, so I won't defend that. And I agree with you that there's articles that do a poor job of articulating the issues here, but you were talking about the headlines.
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Sensationalist articles then. When they put child pornography in the headline, make no mention of the other charge or context in the article that is being sensationalist.

 
Nebfanatic said:
Sensationalist articles then. When they put child pornography in the headline, make no mention of the other charge or context in the article that is being sensationalist.
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I agree about not putting it in the body of the article, but I disagree about the headline. It'd be poor journalism to mention the misdemeanor and not the felony in the headline.

 
The sensationalist part IMO is the articles saying he sent a video of her sexual assault to her without mentioning there has been no trial on the sexual assault nor will it ever go to trial. Sending a video of someone’s rape to them is 100x worse and I would want him kicked off the team if he knew it was rape.

 
Moiraine said:
The sensationalist part IMO is the articles saying he sent a video of her sexual assault to her without mentioning there has been no trial on the sexual assault nor will it ever go to trial. Sending a video of someone’s rape to them is 100x worse and I would want him kicked off the team if he knew it was rape.
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I agree that the articles should be careful and use some nuance, but the victim is claiming it was sexual assault and while I don't think Mo thought it was assault, it's not clear what he knew or thought.

 
RedDenver said:
I agree that the articles should be careful and use some nuance, but the victim is claiming it was sexual assault and while I don't think Mo thought it was assault, it's not clear what he knew or thought.
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He might have known and it might have been assault. Not arguing that. They absolutely need to say “alleged” every time, though. 

 
RedDenver said:
Fair. But I don't think that alone makes the articles "sensationalist".
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It would have taken minimal effort to add the word “alleged” and leaving it out seems like a deliberate move to make the action he took seem a lot worse; that makes it sensationalism to me. They are making it sound as bad as possible by calling it a sexual assault video. And to me it is a s#!t ton worse to send someone’s rape video to them vs. their consensual sex video to them.

 
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Moiraine said:
It would have taken minimal effort to add the word “alleged” and leaving it out seems like a deliberate move to make the action he took seem a lot worse. And to me it is a s#!t ton worse to send someone’s rape video to them vs. a consensual sex video to them.
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You're ascribing motivations to the author that could also be explained as "lazy", "oversight", or "inept". I'm all in favor of criticizing poor journalism, so if you've got an article then by all means tear into it. But I think you're reaching with the generalization that leaving out "alleged" means "sensationalism".

 
RedDenver said:
You're ascribing motivations to the author that could also be explained as "lazy", "oversight", or "inept". I'm all in favor of criticizing poor journalism, so if you've got an article then by all means tear into it. But I think you're reaching with the generalization that leaving out "alleged" means "sensationalism".
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When talking about sexual assault accusations there’s no excuse for being lazy. At best they were lazy and made someone’s action look way worse than it was thru their laziness. That doesn’t make them much better in my eyes and I think it’s less likely than them purposely leaving it out and trying to make it sound worse because it’s more grabby to write it that way. 

 
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