>>No one here is asking for anything like that.
The feeling among FReepers is that a teacher isn't guilty of molestation if she is cute.
That is the only hard and fast rule around here.
Just because the hedonists among here WANTED to have sex when they were underage doesn't make it RIGHT. Same with underage drinking, drinking and driving, doping, etc.
I say dump the law if it is bad law. If the legislature cannot retroactively release him because it is against the state constitution then the judge's actions would be in contradiction to the state constitution.
Change the laws and judges and attorneys are out of the picture.
I agree that our legal system is an unjust and costly system. People who advocate for appeals, jury nullification, activist judges, and a hope and a prayer do nothing to HELP bad laws get changed. CHANGE THE LAWS if there are problems.
I agree that we should change bad laws. That doesn’t help the poor slobs who are already getting screwed because of bad laws though. Like I said before, if your kid or someone you really care about were in a similar situation as this boy, you’d feel differently about this. You’d want his lawyer to do whatever he possibly could to save the boy. You’d want the judge to reconsider the sentence. You wouldn’t call him an “activist judge” if he set it aside. You’d think he did the right thing and think of him as a decent man. I don’t know whether this judge had jurisdiction to do what he did. Our judges in my jurisdiction probably couldn’t get away with that if the State appealed his ruling. My off the cuff guess is that his latest decision will get overturned on appeal. Then boy would have to hope for clemency or a pardon. If he doesn’t get that he’ll spend most of his youth in prison and have to register as a sex offender, for having consensual sex with someone around his own age.
As for the comments about advocating appeals and jury nullification, I guess I can understand opposition to jury nullification, even though I’m all for it in certain cases, but I don’t see how you can be opposed to appeals. That’s been part of our system as long as we have been a country. It was part of the colonial system before that, and the right of appeal has been a part of the systems we based our judicial system on for hundreds of years. The Constitution grants the Supreme Court appellate jurisdiction and every state constitution sets up appellate courts for hearing appeals from trial courts. What is conservative about being against appeals? Again, you’d change your tune if you felt you or someone you care about was was screwed in a trial court. Jury nullification used to be a part of our system, and still is to some degree, but that I’ll leave for another post in another thread.