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