Sex Offender Claims Police Entrapped Him With Animated Emoticons 432
60-year-old John Jacques has appealed his conviction for engaging in sexually graphic online conversations with a police officer posing as a 13-year-old girl, saying the police entrapped him using animated emoticons during the chats. From the article: "Jacques claims prosecutors withheld evidence when they failed to use a computer program that would have shown the jury animated emoticons, which he argued was 'clear evidence of enticement.' He doesn't support his argument with a legal basis, the appeals court found. 'We fail to see how viewing the emoticons as animations would have led the jury to conclude that he was the victim of excessive incitement,' the court wrote."
Re:Right-o, buddy. (Score:2, Interesting)
Lets take the kid out of the equation and substitute something else that is often sensationalized - gun buying.
Mayor Bloomberg of NYC hired some folks in Arizona to go to a gunshow and purchase arms from private individuals. Nothing in Arizona law prevents person to person transfers, and Fed law only requires that both parties be residents of the same state and the transaction take place in that state. So legal for a non-Felon Arizona citizen to buy/sell to/from another non-Felon.
But... Bloomberg wants to close that awful "gunshow loophole". So he has the persons he hired lie and ask if there was a background check, "'cause I prolly can't pass it"
End result? No charges filed, no nothing, because the individuals were in fact not prohibited from buying guns. In fact, Bloomberg had to write Arizona a nice fat check over the whole deal.
Re:Yet another "It was entrapment!" defense (Score:5, Interesting)
Roughly, yes. More specifically, entrapment is something that induces someone to commit a crime that he would not have otherwise. Pretending to be a 13-year old online in order to attract old perverts who are looking for 13-year-olds is not entrapment.
(Important precedent was established in the DeLorean case. DeLorean was told there were investors interested in his troubled car company. As soon as the undercover feds mentioned drugs he started trying to back out. They threatened his family. He dealt. They arrested. He spent a long time and a lot of money at his trial to force them to produce the unedited video of that meeting.)
Someday they will almost all be cops (Score:5, Interesting)
Someday a defense lawyer will be able to prove that almost all the "kids hot for sex" on the Internet are not kids.
At that point he'll be able to credibly claim that his client's goal was to see the look on an adult's face when another adult showed up pretending to be interested in sex with a kid.
Once about 80-90% of "horny kids" online are not kids, judges will have no choice but to admit this into evidence and REQUIRE that the prosecution prove that the defendant is lying and that the defendant really did expect a kid to be there.
This will be especially true in cases where the defendant ONLY chatted up the policeman-pretending-to-be-a-kid and said he was coming over for sex but never showed. In a world where 80-90% of "online horny kids" are adults, NOT showing up is strong evidence that you were in it for the lulz rather than sex.
What I expect to happen a lot sooner:
Some edgy newspaper will, with the approval of their lawyers, go online and hit up "kids" online and then report each and every kid to the local family protective service authority or local cops. The local cops will have to take the time to double-check with the feds and state cops to make sure it's not a sting, chewing up valuable tax dollars in the process. Sooner or later there will be a mis-communication and family protective services or the local cops will "bust" an FBI agent.
I wonder how soon before we cross that 80-90% threshold, if we haven't done so already. I hope someday the "pretend" rate gets to 100%, because that will mean there are 0 horny kids out there chatting up adults for sex in Internet chat rooms.
Re:Someday they will almost all be cops (Score:4, Interesting)
You raise a good point. A girl traveled almost 1,200 miles to visit me. High five?
Definitely high five. I never had something like that. But about the time I was 17, I went on a road-trip to Florida and met up with a bunch of them along the way :) Apparently the phrase "we may never get this chance again" is a heck of an aphrodisiac. Best trip of my life!
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