How does every single person involved in faciliating this case not wake up every morning and think "My entire live is an absurd joke".
I've always been fascinated with the concept of institutional insanity - where a group of people can behave rationally but the combined effect of their behaviour is insane. It's possible there's some kind of 'gridlock' whereby it's impossible (or even damaging) for any individual involved to try and resist.
It's a milder form of the level of insanity you see within totalitarian states. Reading this echos some of the bizarre logic I read coming from guards at Cambodia's horrific S21. The penalty for resisting (or merely lack of enthusiasm for enabling) was immediate and horrific and would have taken superhuman courage. And it would have most likely made no difference.
In this case - the penalty for speaking out is probably nothing worse than damage to one's career.
I'd love to know how many people involved in this at any level harbour doubts without acting upon them.
I'd like to remind people that this is destroying the lives of two young people. Maybe not beyond repair but possibly sending them on a different course than before and probably not a better one.
Because we haven't actively made their life an absurd joke. While there is a lot to be said against internet mobs, it's a pretty mild step to make sure that the individuals involved in these travesties are identified, covered by the press, and made immortal in the internet halls of shame.
They may say "we followed procedure" but it is on them to prove that "procedure" admits no common sense, because, otherwise, it's a failure of their sense and discretion.
This sort of thing has to be remembered next time you hear that prosecutors need broadly worded statutes to have the tools to go after the bad guys.
When people bring up criticisms of laws as over-broad, I often hear that prosecutorial discretion will keep such abuses from happening. People who suggest that the law as written will result in such injustice are often ridiculed for imagining that any prosecutor would act that way, or any Judge allow it.
Turns out, anyone suggesting that even the most absurd interpretations are not possible are the ones who should be ridiculed.
Remember this the next time someone proposes a law, no matter how well intentioned, and even if it happens to advance a cause you care about. The abuses will happen, and how will you feel about that cost if you are the subject of those abuses.
I did't downvote, but I guess it's for implying (without any other data or statistics) that if something bad happens to a member of a group X, then it is an act of prejudice against this group.
Racist? A black defendant doesn't make a case racist. You have to prove that they were charged because of their race. Making a race charge is nonsense.
Unfortunately the US legal system is not defendant friendly. While the US claims "innocent until proven guilty" our legal system is structured opposite. The other, larger in my opinion, problem is that the focus has gone from using common sense to zero tolerance. This case is a prime example. I am not by any means support child pornography, but at the same time the sex offender laws in the US are out of control. Take for example a friend of mine who was drunk and got peeing in front of car on a dark street. A cop just happened to see him and he was subsequently arrested, charged, and convicted of indecent exposure. Because of the conviction he had to register as a sex offender. The US sex offender registry makes no distinction though between the individual caught peeing in the alley and the person who has molested hundreds of kids. The bigger issue is that no politician will touch correcting the situation for fear of being labeled as support child pornography. So while everyone knows the system is screwed up, and people continued to be punished harshly because of it, nothing will change because everyone is so scared to talk about the problem in the first place.
There are many other cases, outside of sex offenses, where individuals who may be guilty of a lesser crime take a plea deal to a larger crime to avoid the cost, time, and most importantly uncertainty associated with going to trial. I think, at least with sex offenses, we will see in the future a shift in dealing with the problem though. It is somewhat like drugs. In the early 1980s Reagan was hard-nosed on the war on drugs. He enacted stiff penalties and encouraged three strike laws. This sent a lot of people to jail for a long time on charges that were otherwise non-offenses. You see people in California serving life sentences for having three charges of possession of marijuana. Today though as a younger generation comes into power, and people are slowly changing their views on marijuana, we are seeing a shift in punishment for the same crimes. I predict that at some point there will be tipping point with crimes like this article highlight where people will say enough is enough we need to fix this problem. Until then though, you are going to see more and more articles like this.
I imagine there's also a risk:reward calculation. As much as it would suck to plead this out, the penalty is 30 hours of community service and not carrying a phone for a year. The alternative carries a penalty of registering as a sex offender, the legal equivalent of a scarlet letter. That can have serious repercussions on your adult life.
So, the calculus is: swallow some pride and be mildly inconvenienced for a year, or fight for justice and hope you don't ruin your life in the process.
While the case may be incredibly weak, the defendant may still be unable to fight it due to other factors (most notably cost and time), and therefore take the plea instead. Lawyers are expensive everywhere.
Generally, refusing a plea deal for ideological reasons is not a smart legal strategy.
I think s/he means lawyers are expensive everywhere in the US. I never heard of someone going bankrupt in Europe for defending themselves so I researched it. In Germany there are fixed prices that lawyers can charge.
The chart for legal salaries has two big lobes: a small sharp one at the very high end and a huge one at the low end. The last time I looked a brand new JD from an unexceptional law school was looking at a starting salary of somewhere in the mid $40k range. So as professionals go, lawyers aren't that expensive (assuming you're not hiring from Harvard).
But running a law office is expensive. You're going to have idle "legal capacity" which has has to be paid for by the clients you do get.
Less of a supply/demand microeconomic reason, more of a willingness-to-pay rationale (i.e. if you are at risk of going to jail, you'll pay ANYTHING to avoid it, and lawyers charge accordingly).
It's kind of paradoxical that people would rather accept unfavorable pleas because they don't want to/can't pay anything.. and the lawyers are still expensive..
There are. It's called public defender, but they are often overworked because they don't have sufficient budget. This means they will suggest most of their defendants to take a plea bargin and not take the risk of going to trail.
Let it be known that Brianna Denison, Fayetteville, North Carolina, by order of the court won't have a cellphone with her to call for help if someone abducts her and tries to rape her.
Story I expected based on headline and the outraged HN comments: "guy takes nude selfies and is charged with crime."
Actual story "guy is charged with having nude images of underage girlfriend on his phone, prosecutors inflate charges to force settlement by reaching to include his own nude photos".
Can a legal expert please explain to me how this can even happen? Shouldn't a judge somewhere be able to take one look at this and realize the ridiculousness of the whole thing and throw it out?
Not a legal expert by any means, but my guess is: the authorities disapprove of teens sexting, there's no specific law against sexting (and probably no constitutional way to ban it), but the child pornography laws can be stretched to extend to it. Thus although the prosecution is facially absurd, everyone involved knows what's "really" being prosecuted here and is okay with it.
Judges aren't supposed to pick and choose which laws get enforced - you can't have a system where the legislature passes a law and rest of the government says "Nah, we don't like that one."
What needs to happen is 1) the legislature needs to change the law to include exceptions where appropriate and 2) the voters in that area need to take this case into consideration when the prosecutor comes up for reelection.
Where to begin. Judges don't enforce laws. The legislature passing laws and the executive deciding which to enforce is part of the design of checks and balances.
I can only assume you skimmed my comment without actually reading it. As I pointed out, judges should not be determining which laws get enforced. In North Carolina prosecutors are elected, so there's no "the executive" involved.
Furthermore, in the federal system the executive does not decide which laws to enforce. That's a dereliction of duty - he's supposed to enforce them all. Not doing your job is not part of "the design of checks and balances".
You are right judges shouldn't decide what gets enforced. But they do get to decide if the law is a good one or bad one. They can overturn a law, so that it will no longer be enforced
Only if there's a constitutional basis for doing so. I'm no expert on North Carolina law, but I'm going to go ahead and assume the state constitution is silent on electronic pictures of naked people.
That is exactly how government works. The legislative branch can veto laws. And the judicial branch can over turn laws that are deemed illegal.
There are a couple of absurdities in this case. One is a person is both a child and an adult. Another us it is perfectly legal fir two people (or one person) to see each other naked, in person. But not in a picture.
>That is exactly how government works. The legislative branch can veto laws.
What? This makes no sense whatsoever. The legislature makes law. They can change it however they want. Veto is a different concept entirely.
>And the judicial branch can over turn laws that are deemed illegal.
No, the judicial branch can overturn laws that are unconstitutional. Laws cannot be illegal unless they're enacted illegally. For a judge to find a law unconstitutional he must have some textual basis for doing so, and "that doesn't seem fair" isn't enough to do it.
>There are a couple of absurdities in this case...
The law is absurd in many, many ways. But the judges are still supposed to apply it as written unless it's unconstitutional. In this case the law is constitutional, so that's not a legitimate avenue for the defendant to pursue.
I've said this before elsewhere, but one concern with cases like this is that it means sex offender registries are becoming more and more useless.
When people end up having to register because of 'stupid' crimes like this - either they stand the chance of being persecuted as a sexual offender for the rest of their lives. Or the registry itself becomes increasingly useless as we start to assume people are there for peeing in the wrong place.
> The Fayetteville, NC 17-year-old, Cormega Copening, faced five charges of sexual exploitation after police found the photos while searching his phone in an unrelated incident at his school last fall.
>Teen prosecuted as adult for having naked images – of himself
The prosecutor is prosecuting on behalf of the very person who is also supposedly the perpetrator. Do you seriously think our founding fathers intended for "The People" v. Copening to be a replacement for Copening v. Copening?
That incident was caused by unfortunate racial stereotyping; this is caused by a literal interpretation of the letter of the law that hasn't caught up with the times.
This happens because the US is turning into a police state where everyone thinks they've got the right and duty to destroy someone else's live if they don't like something about them (race, religion, sexual life, ...), and the authorities are not only OK with that but actively encourage it to promote constant fear amidst population. If they can charge you with anything at any time and destroy your life, you're going to be a good sheep.
I can certainly imagine tolerance to things that look like bombs or even that simulate bombs in every meaningful way other than explosion.
"Zero tolerance" for bombs and weapons hasn't generally meant that bombs and weapons are not tolerated - that was already the case. Instead, it has meant that things that merely evoke the image of a bomb or weapon are met with intolerance.
For example, I imagine you came across this story:
"things that merely evoke the image of a bomb or weapon are met with intolerance": I call it fear...
The deaf boy story is amazingly stupid too. It seems to me we've put to many people in a position to restrict others liberties/rights, and now we pay the price of stupid "rules" or interpretations of "rules". When you give someone a uniform (it's an allegory), you give him power, which must be handled with care... and intelligence.
I see all this as a lack of intelligence/common sense.
I've always been fascinated with the concept of institutional insanity - where a group of people can behave rationally but the combined effect of their behaviour is insane. It's possible there's some kind of 'gridlock' whereby it's impossible (or even damaging) for any individual involved to try and resist.
It's a milder form of the level of insanity you see within totalitarian states. Reading this echos some of the bizarre logic I read coming from guards at Cambodia's horrific S21. The penalty for resisting (or merely lack of enthusiasm for enabling) was immediate and horrific and would have taken superhuman courage. And it would have most likely made no difference.
In this case - the penalty for speaking out is probably nothing worse than damage to one's career.
I'd love to know how many people involved in this at any level harbour doubts without acting upon them.
I'd like to remind people that this is destroying the lives of two young people. Maybe not beyond repair but possibly sending them on a different course than before and probably not a better one.