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posted by martyb on Saturday September 05 2015, @12:10PM   Printer-friendly
from the sense-no-makes dept.

Later this month, a North Carolina high school student will appear in a state court and face five child pornography-related charges for engaging in consensual sexting with his girlfriend.

What's strange is that of the five charges he faces, four of them are for taking and possessing nude photos of himself on his own phone—the final charge is for possessing one nude photo his girlfriend took for him. There is no evidence of coercion or further distribution of the images anywhere beyond the two teenagers' phones.

Similarly, the young woman was originally charged with two counts of sexual exploitation of a minor—but was listed on her warrant for arrest as both perpetrator and victim. The case illustrates a bizarre legal quandry that has resulted in state law being far behind technology and unable to distinguish between predatory child pornography and innocent (if ill-advised) behavior of teenagers.

The boy is being charged with child pornography for taking pictures of himself.


[These teens were of the age of consent in North Carolina and could legally have had sex with each other. Juvenile court jurisdiction ends at age 16 in North Carolina, however, so they are being tried as adults on felony charges of possessing child porn... of themselves. -Ed.]

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  • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Saturday September 05 2015, @02:48PM

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Saturday September 05 2015, @02:48PM (#232623) Journal

    Right, because, unless you're on the jury, that's viewed by the courts are trying to influence jurors on a SPECIFIC trial. Which is incredibly illegal.

    Educate everyone in your life who gets a jury duty letter? They don't care, but nullification activists misrepresent why they're asked to stop and eventually charged.

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by JNCF on Saturday September 05 2015, @03:13PM

    by JNCF (4317) on Saturday September 05 2015, @03:13PM (#232635) Journal

    But prosecution gets to screen jury members, and from what I hear second-hand (I have no legal background or any history of jury duty) they tend to ask jury members if they know of any reason that they might not have to convict the defendant even if the defendant had committed the crime in question. If somebody answers "no" to this and then later brings up jury nullification, they lied under oath. If they say "yes" the prosecution vetoes the jury member; the prosecution has no incentive to allow jury members with knowledge of jury nullification into the court room, so they get screened out.

    If the system is designed to have informed jury members, you'd think they would just tell the jury members about jury nullification, or at least make it so you can't screen out jury members because they know too much about the law. Instead, it feels as if knowledge of the law is being hidden from jury members. Given this system, I can't see blaming the jury nullification activists for trying to inform jury members of the law after they've passed through this dystopian screening process.

    • (Score: 2) by quacking duck on Saturday September 05 2015, @03:58PM

      by quacking duck (1395) on Saturday September 05 2015, @03:58PM (#232646)

      If they say "yes" the prosecution vetoes the jury member

      I'm sure it's not universal, but last time I was on a jury selection both prosecution and defence could each only veto up to a certain number of people. In fact, one side (the defence, IIRC) ran out of vetoes; when they tried vetoing one more, the judge actually verbally told them they'd used all of theirs.

      • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 05 2015, @06:06PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 05 2015, @06:06PM (#232679)

        Last time I was a participant in jury duty the judge overruled every dismissal the defense made and dismissed jurors himself whenever the prosecutor looked at him. If that was not illegal, it surely ought to be. Then again, the prosecutor was in the room so clearly he would not pursue the case.

        It was a case where the police testimony was not readily believable* and so was already brought up during questioning. The defense tried to dismiss jurors that answered "yes" to the questions of (paraphrasing) "Do you have any friends or relatives in the police department?" and "Do police always tell the truth." Anyone that said 8"no" to the second question was dismissed as having potential bias by the judge himself.

        *Two police spotted a black pan in a car at night and tried to pull him over. He took off. The police claim to positively identify him as a specific person during the chase. The suspect then managed to outrun the police, get back into his vehicle, calmly drive away, then be pulled over by the same police hours later. Somewhere between the time the police lost the suspect and pulled him over again they found a gun that had no markings but they knew was tossed by said man. Which was unfortunately lost in evidence (this made some local news). Here is the kicker: this was a district in southeast Michigan. At the time there were no streetlights, many foreclosed homes, and the suspect was pushing the weight-limits of his court chair. So the whole thing came down to the believably of the story where a 300+ pound black man outrun police, in a circle back to his car mind you, while simultaneously being positively identified in pitch black conditions and associated with a gun that no one except the arresting officers have seen.

    • (Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday September 05 2015, @05:59PM

      by frojack (1554) on Saturday September 05 2015, @05:59PM (#232678) Journal

      Both sides get to screen the jury.

      And Both sides have limited numbers of challenges (rejections) of potential jurors.

      The questions are there to detect and exclude people who have a grudge against the government, or the defendant.

      That has nothing at all to do with Jury nullification, where the jury decides by itself that the whole proceeding is unjust even if
      it can be shown that a specific act was against the law. Many juries have nullified upon hearing the evidence without any
      preconceived notion of nullification.

      Not saying this case needs jury nullification.
      The whole fiction of trying them as an adult for pictures of themselves where they are said to be children is sufficient for any jury to find them not guilty, because they can not be both adults under the law and children under the law. The prosecutor has a tough road to hoe, and simply deciding the state did not prove they were children would be sufficient.

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    • (Score: 2) by http on Saturday September 05 2015, @07:39PM

      by http (1920) on Saturday September 05 2015, @07:39PM (#232709)

      In the course of the trial, a juror normally ends up knowing more about the case than when they were first selected. Your scenario of lying under oath just isn't true. There is at least one scenario I recall where a scumball totally committed the crime accused of, but was not convicted since it was actually done with the intent and result of preserving the lives of many people. This was not apparent to all at the start of the trial.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by sjames on Saturday September 05 2015, @04:45PM

    by sjames (2882) on Saturday September 05 2015, @04:45PM (#232655) Journal

    It goes well beyond that. The last time I participated in voir dire, the judge asked us to swear that we would judge only the actions of the defendant and not the law. When I said I couldn't conscionably swear to that. She briefly attempted to convince me that it wouldn't be an ethical problem for me if society deemed the person was to be punished. I countered that because I would know the inevitable consequences of my guilty vote, those consequences WOULD ethically be attributable to me. I was dismissed.

    They would LIKE to keep people from educating friends who get a jury letter, it's just that there is no excuse for them to do so even if they could prove it. Here [nytimes.com] we have a case of someone tried for jury tampering due to him passing out nullification flyers in front of a courthouse. He had no way of knowing if any of the people who went by were jurors at all, much less what case they might be empaneled on.