EvidenceProf Blog notes that in United States v. Jospeh (2nd Cir. 2008), a Defendant "appealed from his conviction for using his computer to send messages on the Internet to entice an individual he believed to be an underaged girl to engage in unlawful criminal sexual activity, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2422(b)." At trial, it was proven that the Defendant entered a chat room "called 'I Love Older Men,' where he initiated a conversation with an individual ... who purported to be a 13-year-old girl," but was in fact a 55-year-old woman who "spends 20 to 50 hours a week surfing the Internet for those she believes to be sexual predators and reporting her findings to the authorities." The defense theory was that the Defendant believed the supposed-teen "was also a sexually experienced adult engaged in role-playing," and the Defendant "sought to bolster his claim through the testimony of his expert witness ... who would have testified about role-playing in the context of sexually explicit conversations on the internet." The Second Circuit found that the expert witness was qualified under Federal Rule of Evidence 702. You may view the opinion here.
EvidenceProf Blog also has coverage of a recent opinion from the Mississippi Court of Appeals, which, according to Miller, "improperly read[] an exception out of the rape shield rule and [found] that evidence of prior sexual relations between the defendant and the alleged victim [is] never admissible." You may view the opinion here.
Feminist Law Professors has a post which notes that "[a] new report by the Poppy Project has found that there are over 921 brothels in London being advertised in newspapers with a 'large and growing' number of young women who are trafficked as sex slaves." According to the BBC, "[b]rothels in the city offer sex for as little as £15, and some are charging £10 extra for unprotected intercourse."
California Lawyer Magazine has an article detailing "the nation's largest and most
expensive hospital for housing and treating men who have been declared to
be sexually violent predators ..." The hospital, which opened in August 2005 at a
cost of $388 million... has been called
everything from a state-of-the-art treatment center to a sex gulag." Although each of the patients has "served a full sentence in state prison for committing one or more serious
sexual offenses, ... instead of being
released, they [are] denied freedom under a [law which allows the state to] commit [sex offenders] to a state psychiatric facility. The limit of
institutionalization was originally two years, with the possibility of renewal. But with the new so-called Jessica's Law, the length of
civil commitment is now "indeterminate."
A Massachusetts Appeals Court judge on has thrown "out the conviction of a homeless sex offender ... for failing to notify authorities that he moved to a new
residence." The man, considered to be at a high-risk of re-offending, "registered his
permanent address as 'the streets of Greenfield' to comply with the
state's sex offender registration laws... [and was later] found guilty of breaking the law when
police found he stayed several nights at a friend's apartment in
Montague and did not tell authorities ahead of time."
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