The federal sex trafficking statute is badly and broadly written. If you give someone under 18 a thing of value for sex, that's trafficking, and the government is not required to prove you knew the age of the minor, with a mandatory minimum of 10 years.
The definition of "commercial sex act," in particular, is so broad that I suspect every high school couple in the country might be trafficking one another.
It's just a shame that Matt Gaetz fell from grace so quickly, or someone might try to more narrowly tailor this law to what people actually mean when they talk about sex trafficking.
Love to have all my conversations over a special encrypted disappearing app and then take screenshots of them
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There's a Supreme Court opinion less than 10 years old that days you can go picket a soldier's funeral with signs blaming his death on gay people, which is a little different than having the government murder you for criticizing it.
There are dozens of television programs, making tens of millions of dollars, whose hosts daily say that Black Lives Matter is a group of communist terrorists.
So yes, there is a meaningful distinction between the prospect that someone might disagree with you and being locked up capricious by a government that punishes people for their speech.
I am proud to live in a country where I can say Rod Dreher is kind of a Nazi.
Mark Weaver argues that Chauvin has a shot based on a 1966 US Supreme Court case, Sheppard, which held that failing to sequester the jury, or order them not to read newspaper coverage, and where the jurors admitted to getting outside information that prejudiced them.
It's an interesting look at an earlier view of free speech, where the Court is scandalized that participants in the trial were talking to the press, and suggests that witnesses should have somehow been prevented from giving newspaper accounts.
I suspect that this precedent won't be of much help to Chauvin, though, since the central reason so many people came to believe he was guilty was also the central piece of evidence at trial--a video of him kneeling on a man's neck while onlookers begged him to stop.
Here's my major question. A magistrate judge in Fulton County apparently found probable cause to believe that this would be Rep. Cannon's third conviction for disrupting the General Assembly.
Is that true?
And if not, will there be false statement charges brought?
This isn't a small thing. To justify the arrest in the first place, the rep had to be committing a felony. And you can't commit obstruction during an unlawful arrest.
So who told Judge Chung this was her third offense?
Here's the punishment part of the code section. If it's not a felony, the arrest is facially unconstitutional.
This is something that someone needs to investigate.
Georgia's felony obstruction statute is a mess, requiring only that someone "offer violence" to an officer. Georgia courts have held this can include passive resistance.
And the General Assembly recently bumped the minimum up to 3 years.
A recent Court of Appeals decision claimed that when the word "shall" is used in a statute to refer to imprisonment, that means the sentence can't be probated or suspended.
Which means that nonviolence resistance would carry mandatory prison time. Every time.
In short, under the new version of the felony obstruction statute, under the new COA interpretation, it's not clear that anyone in the Civil Rights movement would have gotten out of prison long enough to be assassinated