Cristiano

Man's sex legal, cell phone pics of sex illegal | Technically Incorrect - CNET News

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Void

just more evidence that the law and law makers are schizophrenic... I get and even agree with the idea behind drawing a line in the sand.... society breaks down without agreed upon limits. but for society to smoothly operate within those lines, it needs to be a relatively straight line and not some multidimensional hypercurve.

and charges based on speculation are absurd. by that logic you can argue that leaving the door unlocked while having sex was pornographic, or publicly indecent at least based on the theory that someone might walk in.... inconsistent law is inconsistent with social standards, regardless where the line is drawn.

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Wrong Weatherwax

This is like the old military adage about "old enough to die, but not old enough for a beer." The law in this case creates (schizophrenic, good word for it) opposed legislation where clear distinctions cannot be drawn and instead of "intent of law" the entire situation is based on "letter of law." If the 17 year old is old enough to consent then by the situation, they are making an "adult decision" and yet the photographs are "child pornography."

Silly arsed.

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Asher Bertrand

We had a case like that in Michigan within the past few years, too. He was convicted. I still don't get it.

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Innula Zenovka

We have a similar situation in the UK -- age of consent is 16, minimum age to appear in "indecent" photographs is 18, though there's a defence if the model was at least 16 and either married to the defendant, or they "lived together as partners in an enduring family relationship", when the photographs were taken.

I don't know, but I've always thought that the main reason for the higher age limit is a practical one. In most child pornography, the identity of the models is unknown, so, if there's any dispute about whether they're underage, it becomes a factual question for the jury to decide. The law, in the UK at least, is really intended, I think, to protect children under 16, and the reason for the higher age limit is that it's a lot easier to be sure that an image isn't of an 18-year-old than it is to decide if the model was, in fact, 15 or 16 when the picture was taken.

Obviously this causes anomalies, like the present case, where the age of the model is known, and the model clearly consented but wasn't in a long-term relationship with the photographer. I laughed like a drain when, in 2003, the age limit was increased from 16 to 18 because it meant, with hindsight, The Sun newspaper had been happily printing child pornography in the mid-1980s, to the applause of many of their readers, in the form of page 3 pictures of the young Samantha Fox, who started her modelling career with that paper when she was 16.

Certainly here, the police and CPS seem to use a bit of common sense and discretion, in that I've hardly ever (if at all) heard of teenagers getting prosecuted for taking nude pictures of each other on their phones, though I imagine it can't be that uncommon. I guess it's a useful protection, though, if they have a fight and someone's pictures end up on Facebook or YouTube or whatever -- that much easier to get them taken down. And the 8 year sentence mentioned in the article sounds completely savage for the circumstances.

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