Absolutism FTW!!!!!!!!!
Maryland’s Unjust Court Decision on Sexting
A Maryland teen shared a video of her own sex act. She was punished as a child pornographer.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/31/maryland-court-teen-girl-video-law
The top court in Maryland
ruled this week that a teen who sent a sexually explicit cellphone video of herself to two friends violated state child pornography law.
The student identified as SK was 16 at the time and therefore “legally able to consent to engage in sexual conduct”. According to the ruling, she and her two best friends swapped “silly photos and videos” in a cellphone-based group chat “in an effort to ‘one-up’ each other”.
The other group members were identified as AT, a 16-year-old female, and KS, a 17-year-old male. During the 2016-17 school year, SK sent them a “one-minute video of herself performing [oral sex] on a male”.
Prosecutors charged SK as a juvenile with filming a minor engaging in sexual conduct, distributing child pornography and displaying an obscene item to a minor.
The judges said they did
“recognize that there may be compelling policy reasons for treating teenage sexting different from child pornography” and said
legislation differentiating the two “ought to be considered by [Maryland’s] general assembly in the future”.
SK, humiliated and horrified, found herself charged as a child pornographer. The system failed her at every step, from the school resource officer who treated her like a criminal, to the prosecutor who inexplicably brought a criminal case against her, to the courts that affirmed the prosecutors’ ridiculous reading of the law.”
Rebecca Roiphe, a professor of law at New York Law School and former assistant district attorney in Manhattan, agreed.
“This is a ridiculous reading of the statute,” she said in an email. “The law uses two different terms, ‘person’ to describe the perpetrator and ‘minor’ to describe the victim. The legislature clearly did not intend to criminalize the victim.
“I think the case illustrates how troubling the enforcement of sex crimes can be and how important it is that prosecutors use their discretion wisely.”