Quote: (10-16-2014 06:16 PM)Quintus Curtius Wrote:
By any measure, sentencing guidelines (for both federal and state-level sex offenses) are far too excessive in the US for sex-crimes. This was the gist of Grisham's comments and he is absolutely correct. I am disappointed that he backed away from his remarks, but he's a political animal too, and needs his book sales from his female readership.
The past 30 years has seen an explosion in:
The expansion of what constitutes a "sex-offense"
The expansion of punitive "sex offender registries"
The expansion is mandatory minimums for so-called "sex offenses"
If more people really worked in the criminal justice system and saw how these things really played out, they would be shocked.
No one is saying that real criminals should not be punished. So let's put that little canard to rest right away.
But there is a hysteria surrounding these cases that has made rational discussion of them nearly impossible. If people really knew the details of what constitutes cyber crimes, file sharing, and all those details, they would not believe it.
Punishments should bear some relation to the crime committed. And this is not currently happening. This is because legislators feed off the hysteria to get elected; judges go with the flow; prosecutors want to look tough; and the public is apathetic and uninformed.
I am sure that Sp5 and any other practicing attorney (i.e., someone who actually practices criminal defense at the state and federal level in the real world) will agree with me on this.
I think Grisham is exaggerating. Who knows, maybe in Memphis . . .
But for me, child porn is not something you see every day in the courts. I only had one client charged with that in 15 years. He was in his mid-40s, no criminal record, city transit bus driver.
He left a bag on a bus with the Polaroid pictures (long time ago) of a naked 13 year old girl in it. He was fucked because the girl was his live-in girlfriend's daughter. I didn't follow the case all the way to the end, had to pass it on, but he ended up getting the minimum, ten years. There are ways to get around the minimum by reducing the charges, but the prosecutor was not inclined because the guy had taken the pictures himself and the presumed harm to the girl from him manipulating her into posing.
I don't think that many guys are getting roped into long sentences because they clink on the wrong link or have things in their cache. There are no "prisons filled" with 60 year olds like Grisham says.
Is ten years too much? In some cases, yes. There was the case where some suspected child porn consumer was getting bombed with offers - from Fed sting organizations. He ended up complaining about it, but finally succumbed and took the bait. I believe the conviction was overturned because of the entrapment.
A part of my perspective is from a trip to Amsterdam in the 1970s. Me and a fellow soldier were wandering around the red light district like a couple of 19 year olds. We went into a porn shop and I saw a rack full of child porn magazines - the covers featured young (like 7 - 8 years old) girls handling male equipment in various ways. Disgusting. The laws are a reaction to that, because an industry had grown up based on using children to produce these images. Targeting consumers is one way to shut the industry down. So I get the rationale.
The internet has made it easier for every kind of pervert, who in the old days might have thought he was the only one who had that perversion, to find his mates, friends and suppliers. In the case of child porn, the technology has made it possible to disseminate the images more easily. One rationale for the harsh sentences is that it's tough to catch people now, with some technical sophistication and encryption it's probably impossible. So the harsh sentence serves as a deterrent to balance that out. "I'm almost certainly not going to get caught, but if I do I'm fucked, so I won't do it."
The difficulty in catching the guys also means that a lot of resources have to be devoted to trying. You're got several agencies involved, including the NSA probably.
So the panic becomes out of proportion to the actual numbers of these pervs. The moral indignation against the crime means that some police departments think it's a good use of time for their officers to be trolling chat rooms posing as 13 year olds rather than driving around town at night looking for the much more common burglary or shattered drunk driver.
Because you have people devoted to this mission, the mission expands and the cases which are not morally abhorrent, indeed innocent, do get drawn in, like the parents who took pictures of their naked kids in the bathtub.
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