Let's call the son Zach. Having just turned 18, he was visiting a young woman his age whose younger sister introduced him via social media to a 13 year old female who shared his interest in dragons and animation. The two never met. As their shared interest developed via the Internet, so did their friendship.
As the natural process that turns a girl into a woman progressed, the cyber relationship developed a romantic aspect. The girl/woman sent Zach five photographs of herself in her underwear.
Later the girl/woman developed emotional problems due to the impending divorce of her parents and was admitted to a mental health facility. At some point she confided her cyber relationship with Zach to a counselor. The "child protection" laws required the counselor to inform the police, who seized Zach's computer and found chat logs and the five photos.
The consequence was that Zach was charged with 20 felony indictments carrying 350 years in prison. As they always are, the charges were vastly overstated. For example, the five photos sent to Zach of a torso in underwear (apparently the girl's face was not shown) got Zach charged with distribution of child pornography.
No charges were filed by the parents of the girl. The charges were entirely the idea of the prosecutor's office, and the 350 years produced a plea bargain to lesser offences. American criminal justice had secured another victim.
In the absurdity that is American law you can be guilty of "indecent liberties with a minor" without ever having seen the girl in person or ever having been close enough to touch. The advent of virtual reality and video screens means that crimes can have happened in virtual reality that did not happen in real reality.
In my days it was almost impossible to be guilty of indecent liberties with a minor, because the age of female sexual consent was 14. But as females sexually matured earlier, the age of sexual consent was irrationally pushed higher. Today the legal age that a male may have sex with a female is 18. In other words, the absurd American legal system pretends that women do not have sex until after they graduate from high school. Who can imagine college dorms full of virginal women?
When America had a livable legal system, law was based on the common ordinary behavior of people. This is known as the Common Law, the foundation of law in England and the United States.
Today the law is so uncommon as to be absurd. Yet absurdity is enforced with vengeance.
The video age means that crimes can be committed by looking at a video screen, and that is what happened to Zach. Neither his attorney nor the judge told Zach and his parents that his coerced plea meant that there was no appeal and that he was registered for life as a sex offender. Zach had committed a "violent sex offense" online! It was the girl who sent the photos, but the offense was Zach's for having them on his computer.
We owe these crazed results that destroy our youth to "child advocates" who have pushed through in total ignorance of unintended consequences laws that criminalize the normal sexual exploration and testing that accompanies the teen-age years that begin with puberty. Child advocates think that when a kid enters puberty at age 12 or 13 nothing is supposed to happen until the kid is 18. Then at this magic age, everything illegal at 17 becomes legal. People who produce laws like this ruin people. Laws pushed by child advocates have broken up families and taken children from their homes and placed them in foster care where they are often abused. By providing a bounty to Child Protective Services for seizing children, the federal government provides an incentive for CPS to break up families on the slightest pretext.
And they enjoy the ruin that they inflict. When you read Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy, what you encounter are Americans who enjoy ruining other people. What Stevenson is revealing is not racism but evil unleashed. When the liberals destroyed religion as a moral restraint, they released evil. Evil is now everywhere in the West and seldom held accountable -- Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Prison, the CIA Black Site torture prisons, women's prisons where inmates, most of whom are wrongfully convicted, are routinely raped by guards, and American courtrooms in which sit judges whose function is to defend justice but who accept coerced pleas from innocents in order to save themselves work.
This is America, a country totally devoid of justice, a hapless country forced to suffer injustice except for those few cases that heroes such as Bryan Stevenson are able to overturn.
If only Americans in their so-called democracy had the power to make Bryan Stevenson Attorney General for life and give him the power to write and enforce the laws would justice return to America.
God help a country as totally devoid of justice as the United States of America.
It is important to understand that very few of these wrongful convictions are mistakes. They are done willfully, because the overriding incentive of the American criminal justice system is to produce convictions at all cost.
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