Sting

Former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter was recently charged in a child-sex sting operation. Mr. Ritter allegedly masturbated on a web cam when speaking to a person who identified himself as a fifteen year old girl, but was in fact an undercover police officer. The charges included unlawful contact with a minor, criminal use of a communications facility, corruption of minors, indecent exposure, possessing instruments of crime, criminal attempt and criminal solicitation.

Okay, my take on this may not be the typical one, but I absolutely hate these sex chat stings. Before you start making assumptions, I do not go into sex chat rooms, and I don't have any interest in fifteen year old (or any minor) girls, boys, or barnyard animals. And if someone ever did anything to one of my kids, there is a part of me that would want to make sure that no trial was necessary as justice would be more immediate and personal.

One problem that I have with the stings is my belief that but for the stings, these guys will not be engaging in these type of conversations with fifteen year old girls. I don’t believe that very many fifteen year olds are looking for explicit chat or to meet some middle aged overweight man. These just don’t exist, or if they do, in extremely small numbers. So the men caught up in these stings would almost certainly never have actually interacted with a real fifteen year old girl.

In effect, the police are manufacturing a crime. This isn’t like a sting where they know there is drug use going on in a neighborhood so they set up a fake buyer to catch a dealer. In that case, there is crime going on and they are trying to catch people who are actively engaged in the crime. In most stings, you are probably catching people who have already committed this crime in the past. It is unlikely that you are the drug dealer’s first sale. Here, it is not likely that the suspect has actually ever met a minor for sex. They may not even have explicitly chatted with a real one before.

There was a small town in Ohio, I think Bethesda, where the police have been doing the sex stings for quite a while. They do the same drill; the cop is in the chat room posing as an underage girl. The man arranges to meet the “girl” and they bust him. The same kind of thing they had on the TV show “To Catch a Predator”. The issue that I have is that they aren’t catching people in their small down. They are luring bringing these “sex offenders” into their town. Some of these guys travel a good distance to meet these “girls”. Many may have gone their entire lives without ever visiting Bethesda Ohio but for these stings. Is the Bethesda Police department really making their town safer? Is it their job to lure people from Cincinnati to their town to bust them? I don’t think so.

Another real problem that I have is that it’s not clear at all that these guys are actually committing crimes. He is charged with unlawful contact with a minor and criminal attempt. I am not an expert in this area of law, or in the law of the jurisdiction in which he is charged. Here is the problem. He never had sexual contact with a minor. Additionally, in the legal sense, his actions did not rise to the level of attempted sexual contact.

Attempt, as I learned in law school, requires that you took an action, which if successful would be illegal. For example, I take a gun and attempt to shoot someone with it, but I miss. One of the charges against me might be attempted murder, because if I had been successful in what I was attempting, I would have murdered you.

Let’s change the scenario slightly. I have a gun and want to kill my neighbor. I sneak into his house and see him lying on the couch and I gleefully pull the trigger several times, riddling him with bullets. An autopsy reveals that my neighbor died of a heart attack hours before I even entered the house. I cannot be charged with attempted murder. I intended to kill him, and I took actions to carry out that. The problem is that it is legally impossible to murder someone who is already dead.

So if there was a fifteen year old girl on the other end of these sex sting operations, then the men could reasonably be charged with unlawful contact and other attempt related charged. They were actually having contact with the minor. If they arranged a meet, would have resulted in them actually meeting a minor. Instead, they were talking to an undercover cop. They didn’t have unlawful contact with anyone. Their actions, even if they met the person they were talking to, would not have resulted in them having any contact with any fifteen year old.

Perhaps they’ve amended some of these laws to overcome these obstacles; I’m not sure. Maybe I’m wrong and there are court cases out there that say I’m wrong. But if you apply the law as they taught us, it seems like many of these charges should not stick.

Look, I don’t feel any real sympathy for these guys. Even if they would never have had actually had the opportunity to really meet a minor girl (or boy), their actions are hardly admirable. It’s terrible to arrange a meeting with someone you think is underage for a sexual encounter. The problem that I don’t think they are catching people who are actually the ones harming young people. They are catching stupid horny guys who would never have hooked up with a minor girl. Are we really safer from having caught these guys?

I’m also not sympathetic to the guys because they are stupid. I know that sometimes we males think with the lower half of our body, but come on. Even if you thought that minor girls are desirable, do you really think they are going to be into an old fat guy? And if a girl from central Ohio wants you to come and meet her, um, dude, it’s a sting, one hundred percent guaranteed.

Look, I know that it’s not always easy to protect our children from harm, and perhaps the police have good intentions. I just don’t think that we are any safer at all from these stings.