A proposal to increase the punishments for sexual offenders could put teenagers in prison.
State law punishes sexual conduct with a minor who is at least 15 with a class 6 felony — the least serious felony type, which can potentially be moved down to a misdemeanor. House Bill 2169 seeks to rectify that by changing the classification to a class 4 felony, for which the standard penalty is 2.5 years in prison, and mandating one year of jail time if the offender was placed on probation.
Arizona has a Romeo and Juliet law that provides a limited exception for cases in which a minor that is 15 or older had consensual sex with someone who is under the age of 19, or is still in high school and is no more than two years older than the victim.
Advocates fear that HB2169 could preempt judicial discretion in complicated cases, leading to more kids in jail for having intimate relationships with their peers. Vicky Campo, a member of Arizonans for Rational Sex Offense Laws, a local group that advocates for people it sees as being wrongly relegated to the sex offender registry, spoke against the bill during a House Judiciary Committee meeting on Wednesday.
“Even if the prosecutor, the judge and the jury all agree that probation is an appropriate sentence, this law mandates jail and would do nothing to improve public safety,” she said.
Chairman Quang Nguyen, who introduced the measure, disagreed, saying that the bill’s intent was to target predators who were able to plead their offenses down to a misdemeanor. Campo pointed out that the bill included no provisions that specified the offender must be an adult, which opened up the door for teens to be prosecuted under it.
Action alert, Arizona residents! Write and call. Don’t just let this happen without a fight.
Here is the bill lookup page:
Exactly!!!!
Dude, trust me. We totally won’t use it the way it technically allows us to use it.
Yeah, I’m sure he laws that now have kids as young as eight being registered, had that as their intent.
“Chairman Quang Nguyen, who introduced the measure, disagreed, saying that the bill’s intent was to target predators who were able to plead their offenses down to a misdemeanor”
Mr. Chairman, you need to do some fixing over there in your own country of Vietnam where child sex runs rampant. And I’m not talking about teenage love affairs that you want to criminalize even more in America
What “predators?” I read as many news stories about sex crimes as I can find and I can’t remember a man arrested for sex with an older teen who had a long track record of sex with older teens. Nearly every arrest for this is a first time offense. Despite what Fast Times at Ridgemont High tried to claim, there aren’t many men specifically attracted to 16 year old girls—they’re pretty much identical to college girls, who have the advantages of being able to legally consent and generally being able to date without parental approval. I find the (usually cited) pimping angle equally absurd—look at the bizarre Sarah Lawrence case, and you’ll see that graduate students from elite universities appear just as easy to manipulate into sex cults as minors. These are solutions in search of problems.
I have long said that as offender laws are either dropped or softened, politicians will simply propose new ones to take their place. This is solid proof that the registry is not only not ever going away, but will expand exponentially in yrs to come.