Quote (Goomshill @ Jan 29 2022 06:27am)
Adam is an 18 year old living in some smalltown in nowhere Minnesota, lets call it Nowthen. He's madly in love with his girlfriend, 17 year old Bess. They are fresh out of the same class of Nowthen High and ready to take on the world together. But Bess is worried that Adam is afraid of commitment and moving too fast. But Adam surprises her with a diamond ring and gets down on one knee asks her to marry him and she's estatic and says yes. Its that night as they celebrate their future together that a SWAT team cuts a hole in the ceiling and rappels in guns drawn, smashing through windows and shoving Adam into a straitjacket with a hood over his head, just as Terry Gilliam imagined it. The prosecutor enters the room and informs him that he's charged with child sex trafficking by coercion and faces life in prison and will be held without bail for a year pending trial.
1591 seems pretty clear on its face what its intent is. Sex trafficking by coercion, threats and violence doesnt take imagination. Its for when a pimp kidnaps a girl, throws her in the trunk of a car, drives her to a crackhouse and tells her if she doesnt make him money he knows where she lives and will blow her moms brains out. A heinous crime that deserves life in prison. And some clever prosecutors set a precedent that even though the statute only applies to sex trafficking by coercion, when the victim is a child, it can be legally assumed with no other evidence because a child cannot consent. And naturally, a heinous violent crime like this has no Romeo and Juliet clause baked in. There's no exclusion for relationships between similarly aged couples, nor for relationships that were otherwise consensual. And now per this case, prosecutors can establish that a relationship was a commercial sex act by the mere proximity of an exchange of a thing of value, even if they don't prove direct quid pro quo or cash exchange or explicit bargaining. A man giving expensive gifts and the mere inference of expectations, is enough. So sadly for poor Adam living the Brazil scenario, the prosecutors who spied on him and his fiancee can point to the fact they weren't planning to get together that night and would not have 'but for' his expensive gift. The wonders of a 'but for' standard being applied by olympic gymnast prosecutors like we have in this case.
The law as interpreted gives the state and feds the ability to declare any consensual relationship between legal aged adults as prostitution when any gifts are given. It lets that label override state age of consent and impose federal age of consent despite never crossing state lines or affecting interstate commerce. It also does not distinguish the age of the offender, its not reserved for 30+ year old guys, it could be people only months apart in age. And in the non-hypothetical case of this thread, first time, non violent offender Anton Lazarro is being held without bail for a year in a state where you can be responsible for the deaths of numerous people and be the worlds biggest flight risk still get immediate bail, like the human smuggler who let 4 illegal aliens freeze to death on the MN-CA border. Or the endless stream of recidivist 30+ conviction felons who commit one shooting while out on bail for another and repeat.
It speaks volumes he was dragged away while literally in the middle of uploading dirt on Ilhan Omar and the prosecutors openly acknowledge that his arrest was timed because he made the damn fool mistake of bringing his evidence to the FBI before he published it.
Bess is then informed that Adam did this with 5 other women and is actually over 20 years old, and he only gave her the ring to get her to sleep with him.
Oh wait, that kind of ruins your story doesn't it?