[Jean Valjean]

(02-14-2017 08:54 PM)Paracelsus Wrote:  

You're missing the real motivation: it's an easy conviction, easy money for fat cops with quotas to reach per month.

The way these laws are usually set up, the very fact of possession all but proves the crime. All you have to do is seize the phone, prove it's registered to him, and that's the end of it. No need to collect DNA, no need to get a bunch of IQ-90 witnesses to speculate about whether he was wearing a blue cap or a red one on the day, no search warrants. Easy money.

And there's also that, because police have had individual discretion hammered out of them by BLM movements and similar demanding that they be transparent with every single decision on prosecution they make, regular cops are shit-scared of getting done by IA as a paedophile enabler if they don't take a 17 year old with naughty pictures to the cleaners.

And lastly: in jurisdictions where District Attorneys often have to campaign for their positions, there is an incentive to be overzealous on the prosecution of minor crimes. This is one where the Westminster system has it over the US one: DAs, or public prosecutors, are firmly part of the executive branch and are appointed, not elected; while this isn't a panacea on the issue of independence, it's often easier to oppose one's boss than it is the mob.

By the way, I call bullshit about the story's suggestion that he'll get a "sexually violent predator" designation, if all he did was receive photos. Looking at the Virginia statute, all the offenses listed there are stuff like rape, object penetration, etc. Not child porn. If the facts are what the articles says they are, then the Commonwealth overcharged him, as they tend to do, and the harsher charges will end up being dropped or dismissed.

I forgot to mention in my earlier post -- I used to belong to a church that was pastored by a police detective. We had a juvenile and domestic relations judge in the congregation, and he would sometimes give her spiritual counsel on how she was supposed to rule in various cases. Sometimes, if she didn't follow his advice, he would bring this up before the whole congregation.

There was one situation in which a kid got charged with a felony because he took a video of he and his girlfriend having sex, and showed it to some friends at school, before deleting it from his phone. The judge in our congregation allowed the charge to be plea bargained down to a misdemeanor. My pastor asked rhetorically, "What good can come from recording a sexual act? How demeaning is that, showing it to his friends!" and said she shouldn't have accepted the plea bargain. The judge said she didn't want to give the kid a felony record, and the pastor asked, what if the kid does something bad in the future, and the court in that future case doesn't know that he committed this very serious crime, because it was plea bargained down to a misdemeanor?

The judge then said that the evidence was weak, because the video had been deleted. The pastor then said, if the evidence was that weak, maybe the case should've just been dismissed altogether. He then said it would be better if the court would try every case, rather than accepting plea bargains. (I can't say I disagree with that.)

This was a Bible-based church, heavily influenced by Baptist teachings. So there you have the femiservative perspective. It's not just a matter of these cases being easy to prosecute; it's also that femiservatives really take child porn very seriously. And of course, the Bible says nothing about a crime being less serious, or not a crime at all, if the person committing it is a minor.

On the other hand, there was another situation in that church, in which a girl told the church that her older brother had molested her years earlier. Her parents were aghast, but the pastor said, "You've made this into a family tragedy, but what would you have done if you'd caught him doing that? You would've spanked his butt and told him not to do it again, and that would've been the end of it." So in the pastor's eyes, child porn was actually more serious than molestation.

I got into a discussion about this with a counselor of mine once. She said that if she was molested, and someone jacked off to video of that, she would want him thrown in jail. The idea of someone sitting at a computer masturbating to pictures of children being abused, or exploited, or whatever the case may be, just really pisses people off, and they demand severe retribution for that. The guy who actually abused the kid maybe only spent a few minutes doing that, but the guy who looks at child porn might be watching it over and over, spending hours doing that before he finally gets caught, so in that sense, he seems to them like the more vicious one.