Sex Trafficking Stings, Lifetime Registration, and Ethics
(Weekly Update #220)
Dear Members and Advocates,
One of my favorite movies of all time is the 1983 comedy, Trading Places. The movie is about two brothers who are the owners of a large commodities firm. They make a bet on whether they can take two people from opposite ends of the social hierarchy and see if the men are able to function in their lives if they trade places. They frame one of their top executives as a thief and get him arrested. Then they take a homeless hustler and put him in the executive’s place. The executive struggles to survive having lost his job, his fiancée leaves him and he eventually spirals to the point of attempting suicide. In the meantime, the hustler thrives in his new role and his new life, despite being on the streets just weeks earlier. The film has nothing to do with the registry, but the same social experiment that the brothers performed is very reminiscent of what takes place in our world.
Last week we posted an article about a man who committed suicide after he was convicted in a law enforcement sting. The news reports don’t discuss how his arrest came about and we won’t speculate, but in a number of these online stings you will have a person looking to meet someone on an app intended for adult dating but they are baited into a “child sex trafficking sting”. Many of these men were not seeking to engage in sexual activity with a minor – they were on an adult dating app. Unfortunately in too many cases, undercover officers aggressively groom the men by baiting and switching in a fictional minor, steering the conversation towards sexual topics and encourage them to do something they were possibly never inclined to do in the first place.
You have to wonder how many people currently on sex offender registries for online solicitation or traveling to meet a minor would have never been “sex offenders” if they did not encounter the undercover officer and were not prodded to commit a crime. Likely, but for the sting they would continue in their lives, they would continue in their jobs, perhaps they would have met an actual adult (which is why they were on the dating app to begin with), they could have fallen in love, gotten married, started a family, etc. Much like the executive in the movie Trading Places, but for the intervention, the trajectory of their lives would be completely different.
But Florida is not done with the experiment, because even when the individual is done with his sentence it continues. The lifetime “registry” comes with a myriad of rules and requirements. If you miss one, knowingly or unknowingly, intentionally or unintentionally, it’s a third degree felony. Florida puts your picture on the internet so that when someone searches your name the first thing that comes up is your “label”. They restrict where you can live, sometimes to less than 1% of the area in a city. They restrict where you can go, where you can work and continuously change the rules at any given moment. They make it practically impossible to succeed. Can you imagine what it would be like if instead of having laws trying to trip you up and impede your success, the laws fostered success? How different would our lives be if the reentry process helped you find suitable housing and employment? And how much more successful would we be if the laws encouraged healthy community involvement and family reunification instead of isolation? I’ll bet most of us would be doing much better than we are now and more importantly our communities would be safer.
The cruel experiment in Trading Places did make for a funny movie, but in real life it’s not funny. If, instead of baiting people into an offense, more resources were focused on prevention, perhaps we would have less crime? Curiously, isn’t that the objective of the criminal justice system? It sure doesn’t seem that way when you have law enforcement officers manufacturing the crimes they arrest people for. You can’t tell me that with all the advancement in technology and artificial intelligence, law enforcement does not have the know-how to filter out and remove or drastically reduce the number of illegal images on the internet. If the cast of an MTV reality show can figure out how to do reverse image searches through Google to find the true identity of a “Catfish”, certainly they can teach the federal government how to do something similar.
But they don’t and their reasons for not doing so have sparked debate about the ethics in many of these stings. In a New Yorker article from last year on drug stings, one former agent was quoted as saying, “undercover methods are relatively unhindered by constitutional or legislative restrictions. There are no clear legal limitations on the length of the operation, the intimacy of the relationships formed, the degree of deception used and the degree of temptation offered and the number of times it is offered. No judge is required to sign a warrant, and law-enforcement officials do not have to provide any evidence that a person is already engaged in criminal activity before initiating an undercover investigation.” That’s not to say that there are not plenty of wrongdoers out there, but then why not apply resources to solving actual crimes instead of manufacturing crimes and trying to lure people into them?
If the argument for stings were that it’s simply easier to shoot fish in a barrel, I’d understand (I wouldn’t agree with the general concept, but it would make sense to me). But with the advent of technology and artificial intelligence, you would think finding actual criminals would be easier today than it was decades ago, as well. If major marketing companies have the power to know what we are shopping for before we type it in, there are clearly tools available to help flag actual online predation. Filters can be implemented through internet gateways to flag files that match known illegal image attributes. The government can also compel social media and dating sites to perform identity verification when opening accounts. Something as simple as that would at least reduce the number of fake profiles and would prevent actual underage children from joining adults-only dating apps. And if the companies complain about the unconstitutional infringement of implementing such requirements, wouldn’t that be justified by “if it saves one child…”?
The government can also invest more resources into education. If that same officer whose job it is to sit at a computer and pretend to be a 14-year old spent the same amount of time going into the schools and speaking to audiences of students about sexual abuse prevention, perhaps they could prevent numerous children from becoming victims or even prevent them from becoming perpetrators when they grow up. It just seems like a horrible misapplication of resources to put time and money into “fictional children” when there are actual children who are in need of protection.
Nobody forced the man who killed himself last week to commit suicide. That was his own doing. I just can’t help but think he would be alive today if not for the reverse sting to protect a fictional kid. I also can’t help but wonder how many fewer people would not be considered “sex offenders” had the same not happened, had law enforcement implemented tools to help remove (or drastically reduce the number of) illegal images online, or had more resources been invested in educating our children and the general public of the risks and consequences existing online. Most importantly, how many actual crimes would be solved or prevented if we focused resources on prevention rather than punishment. I am confident that our communities and ourselves would be far better off if we found a way to successfully integrate returning citizens into our communities, rather than setting them up to fail.
It’s time to rethink the registry.
Sincerely,
The Florida Action Committee
ANNOUNCEMENTS
See Calendar of Events – Keep up with Meet-and-Greets in your area, Support groups, Membership Calls, and other events. For questions, contact membership@floridaactioncommittee.org or call 833-273-7325,Option 1.
Click Here for Calendar, and double click on the event to view details and RSVP instructions
Aug 6 – Meet-and-Greet in Apopka
Aug 20 – Meet-and-Greet in Daytona
Aug 26 – Women Only Meet-and-Greet – Fort Lauderdale
Aug 27 – Meet and Greet in Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood
Become a County Coordinator. The only requirement is your desire to HELP us organize your county. If you are interested in joining the County Coordinator Team, leave message at 833-273-7325, Option 1, or email membership@floridaactioncommittee.org
Letter-Writing Campaigns – If you would like to participate in sending educational information to specific decision makers in Florida, please contact Media@floridaactioncommittee.org. Volunteers must be willing to proudly identify themselves by using their own name and return address on the letters.
SOME HEADLINES FROM THIS WEEK
CALL TO ACTION: Brevard County Commission Meeting AUG 2
UPDATE The agenda for the forthcoming Brevard County Commission meeting has been posted and they WILL be discussing the amendment to their sexual offender/sexual predator ordinance. We are calling upon members to appear at the Commission meeting to speak against the…
Kansas Supreme Court Holds Registration Violation is a Strict Liability Crime
Not knowing you have to register something or not having the mental capacity to understand how to register is not a defense to a registration violation according to the Supreme Court of Kansas. A person required to register in Kansas was convicted of a failure to…
RealPage incorrect sex offender data $9.73M class action lawsuit settlement
RealPage agreed to pay over $9.73 million to resolve claims that it violated the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) by allowing incorrect sex offender registry data on tenant screening reports. The class action lawsuit settlement benefits individuals who were…
Lets call out Florida for not caring about children
The state of Florida is reporting such a severe shortage of teachers that it has recently announced a program to hire military veterans and spouses with absolutely no teaching experience or educational qualification to teach our children. Counties across the state are…
I have been on FAC for a while now and some past posts come to mind. There was one in particular where someone was messaging back and forth and then the person stated they were really 14 (or some age under 18) when they originally stated they were 18 or older.
The person said they were no longer interested once finding out they were underage and signed off. Yet law enforcement still showed up and arrested the person. That is stacking the numbers right there. And the judges turn a blind eye as if saying, “We got another stripe on our jacket, well done guys.”
I wish there were some honest statistics on how many people are falsely accused, unrightfully arrested and do time for something they either didn’t commit or were tricked into doing/saying.
The department of injustice needs an overhaul.
Well written and sensible!! Thank you.
A couple of years back I attended a series of hearings regarding a man arrested for solicitation. He was chatting up a 16-year-old in a downtown hotel lobby while she was waiting for her mother to get off work. There was no direct sex talk but an offer for lunch sometime with her and perhaps her mother. He had given the young woman his phone number.
When the mother arrived, she whisked her daughter away and was angry about the encounter. Unfortunately for the man, the mother was a federal prosecutor who went upstairs and arranged a sting with her state counterparts. The other salient fact is that the age of consent in this state is 16, so even if he had made sexual proposals no law would have been violated.
The sting required the investigator pretending to be “Gwen” to say she was only 15, and enticed him into meeting at a convenience store where he was arrested. The happy ending was that the (female) judge ruled that since the original legal encounter did not represent a predisposition to illegal activity the man was entraped, and she dismissed the case. The unhappy ending was that the process took over a year during which he was held pretrial.
As far as I know, neither the federal nor the state officials were in any way reprimanded, nor would a federal lawsuit be feasable due to qualified immunity. This case is clearly an example of just how low law enforcement can go to get the “bad guys.”
Concerning this week’s editorial about reverse tech to catch those putting CP out there:
I agree with that assessment. However, as a friend told me, the governments don’t want to catch the makers of such because, once ALL CP is gone, then people wouldn’t be going TO prison as much. The government doesn’t want the CP to stop because there is BIG money funding these “stings”… there is BIG money in prosecuting the viewing offenders… there’s BIG money in housing the offenders for decades… and there BIG money in registering the offender on a website for the rest of there life.
If you eliminated all CP from being made and distributed on the internet with the high-tech technology, then you wouldn’t have as many offenders, purposely, or accidentally. Thousands of people would lose their jobs or be reassigned… there would be less money for prisons, private or otherwise… ankle monitor makers stocks would go down because there would be fewer sex offenders from CP.
Governments and BIG business WANT the CP to continue on the internet so they can still get those MEGA BUCKS from the taxpayers…
It’s simple economics… Allow CP to be readily available; use scare tactics to super frighten the taxpayers into believing ALL SEX OFFENDERS WILL REOFFEND; build a huge business that is funded by taxpayer dollars and approved by the frightened taxpayers; keep the lie going thru false information thru various media…
This is how our government works… look at COVID… I’m not saying it doesn’t exist… I’m not saying people haven’t died from it (I have friends and family who have)… but look at how the government put unadulterated FEAR into the nation, the world… and now they continue to keep that fear going, milking every dime they can out of the American people… each new varient is money in their pockets, ESPECIALLY BIG PHARMA… and I can almost guarantee that there are some high up government officials who have their hands DEEP in big Pharma’s pockets… and where do you think they learned a lot of this type of governmental taxpayer funded big dollar theft from??
Government officials in every state have their big ol’ paws so deep in businesses that provide sex offender commitment centers, ankle monitors, websites, fees for parole offices and officers whose only job is sex offender supervision, etc, there is no way this is EVER going to end.
Am I disgruntled, sure… I did my time… walked to the police station and turned myself in when I found out I was under investigation… went to prison for 15 years and thank the Lord for it because it removed me from that addictive behavior… now I just want to get my life back… become a productive member of society again…
Unfortunately… In the state of Tennessee I’ll be wearing an ankle monitor for the rest of my natural days. 😑
Luther
You said: “Unfortunately… In the state of Tennessee I’ll be wearing an ankle monitor for the rest of my natural days. 😑”
Brother, do NOT claim that. Give it to God and if it is His will, He will restore you eventually. Just keep doing the right thing and do not give them any reason to send you back. I cannot promise you will be freed from Monitor, but I can promise you if it is His will, then it will be so. In the meantime, do not give in to temptation. Stay strong and if not for yourself, for your family.
Thank you CherokeeJack… I want to believe that, but we live in a world today that is almost void of God the Father, The Son, and the holy Spirit. Most Christians out there today, believe God can cure sickness, heal bones, raise someone from the dead… However, ask them to believe that the Lord can cure mental illness and remove child predator thought, to them, that is just something God cannot, or will not, do…
However, concerning me and my house? We believe God is capable to do all, and more…
Thank you
for your comments.
Luther S.
The sad fact is that there is far more child porn out there than the government has the power to delete. And much of it circulates for free, with no money involved. Our Media Chair disseminated a New York Times article on this.
But the downloading or sharing of such material is relatively straightforward to detect and to prove to a jury. Production can be a little harder to prosecute but carries a Federal mandatory minimum of 15 years so a prosecutor with probable cause won’t shy away from those cases, either.
I believe FAC’s position remains, child porn is a crime. We can have a legitimate discussion regarding sentencing guidelines, mandatory minimums, and collateral consequences, but I think we ought to resist the temptation to appear angry at prosecutors for doing their job in prosecuting these types of crimes.
(Now, sting operations involving fake children in a bait-and-switch can be a different matter, I get that).
I do not think anyone is denying there should be consequences for child porn. What I and many are saying is, some are being sentenced for way longer for just viewing photos than someone who actually had a sexual encounter with a real minor. Same thing with stings, I have seen someone get more time for “Thinking” they were going to meet a minor than someone who actually did meet a “Real” one.
Intentions should not get you more time than someone who actually committed a physical act with a minor. But depending on where you live, the prosecutor and how many crazy charges they throw at you, and how good or bad your lawyer is, you could be totally screwed.
Also, and this is a probably the biggest of them all, the mindset of the judge you are assigned to. Two different people with the same charge, can get a different judge. One person gets probation and the other one gets 5 years in prison. Especially insane in my case where I had never even had a speeding ticket in my life. As a first-time offender I was thrown into the oven by the judge to be baked on the “Extra crispy” setting.
No one who has sexual contact with a minor should expect easier treatment than for a non-contact offense. G-d help you if you assume otherwise.
To Re:
No where in my statement did I say that. I said it happens, I did not say anyone expected an easier sentence. Please clean your glasses and re-read what I wrote instead. I said people who view child porn are often getting more time than those who actually had physical contact.
I read this article very carefully because Im one of those that you described. I was on an adult only site looking to meet an adult female. I knew it was not a minor I got my suspitions and did a backgroud check and learned that the info i was given belonged to an adult female.I gave the policy several declination to their travel offers after day 5 i wanted to see who this person was and showed up and was arrested, I had no condons, chocolate or alchohol on me. basically the person came out to the street and I realized was not the one from the pic and was when i decided to get of from my car. I went to trial and lost and got 48 months in prison. and lifetime sex offender. Now I have seen people having sex with teenager and getting prosecuted and some of them getting charges dropped and other getting probation or county time. I dont undertand how is legal to get 20 years for thinking about doing something that someone else put in your mind!! that is unconstitutional because is severe punishment but somehow no attorney is bringing that to the florida supreme court. I dont know.. sometimes I think is all a game.