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I think one could easily see the difference between accidental or incidental peeping and intentional. That is the same as the difference between seeing somebody topless at the beach vs looking through their window at home. Laws have been expanded in much flimsier circumstances when it served the interests of liberals or even sometimes conservatives.
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<p>You're missing the point. It doesn't matter what's right or wrong, what matters is the law. He didn't violate the law he was charged with.</p>
<p>Little boys don't get charged with crimes as they are not assumed to have adult level judgment capacity. An adult doing the same thing should be arrested. The boys may need better parenting.</p>
<p>The law just says privacy. That has proven to be a very BIG word depending on circumstances. I think a girl standing in a store should have the expectation that people are not going to be crawling on the floor for a peek. Let's just imagine the cops were for some reason sneaking around looking up skirts with a camera to catch thieves or something. I'm sure civil rights types would be all over it.</p>
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I think a girl standing in a store should have the expectation that people are not going to be crawling on the floor for a peek.
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<p>And if the law had stated "reasonable right to not have people crawling on the floor trying to peek up girls skirts" I'm sure we would have an argument. Unfortunately it saws "right to privacy" and you have no right to privacy at a shopping mall, it's a public place.</p>
<p>I think they could easily find that the area under your clothes is not a public space. As I said, the law has been more creative many times in the past.</p>
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I think they could easily find that the area under your clothes is not a public space. As I said, the law has been more creative many times in the past.
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<p>What don't you get about the law? Take it word for word because that's what it is. </p>
<p>"in a place where there is a right to a reasonable expectation of privacy."</p>
<p>A skirt isn't a place. The victim wasn't "inside" a skirt. She was inside a public shopping mall.</p>
<p>A place is any volume that could be physically described. The area under a skirt could certainly be considered "a place". It's not that big a leap of logic. Police have much more leeway to look around what is visible in your car or home during a routine stop but they are not allowed to look under your clothes without your permission or a warrant. Thus your body out of general view is not free for police inspection because of your right to privacy. I think people should be accorded the same freedom from inspection by random people.</p>
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The area under a skirt could certainly be considered "a place".
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<p>This is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Under a skirt isn't anymore a place than inside my mouth. Should we have laws for inside my mouth? How about laws for under my right shoe? That's a place too...</p>
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I think people should be accorded the same freedom from inspection by random people.
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<p>I agree 100%. Unfortunately you're living in a world where what you "think" should happen as opposed to what the law says. The rest of us live in a world where the word of the law determines the outcome of cases as opposed to what you think.</p>
<p>Just a thought here: Barrons, are you really comfortable with the idea that criminal law should be subject to "interpretation" by any judge to mean whatever he thinks it should mean, regardless of what it actually says? I see a real difference between courts taking a broad view of what government cannot regulate and a strict construction of what government can lock a person in a cage for doing. I feel a lot better with the idea that criminal laws should be required to clearly and unambiguously define what is criminal, while the constitution should be interpreted broadly on the side of the individual with regard to what the government can or cannot force him or her to do. Maybe you feel differently.</p>
<p>Many criminal laws once intended to cover one crime are now used broadly on others. RICO for one was never intended to apply to protest groups and many others it has since been applied to. It was for the Mafia. So yes, I can accept some creative interpretations. I think laws should be broadly applied against criminals. Not just the government.</p>
<p>I'm disgusted by the crimes and the lack of punishment and, of course, would love to see the perverts go to jail, but I have to side with kluge. What the city of Seattle did is great: they specifically defined that videotaping up a skirt is a crime and outlined the punishment.</p>
<p>"Under a skirt isn't anymore a place than inside my mouth. Should we have laws for inside my mouth? How about laws for under my right shoe? That's a place too..."</p>
<p>Ahem, Lax, I think if someone decides to shove a camera into your mouth, that would be considered an assault :)</p>
<p>RICO was very broadly drafted, and one of the key Congressional staff people who drafted it, who later became a (conservative) law professor at Notre Dame, was a constant proponent of its broad application. And, even then, the breadth of RICO's application remains highly controversial -- without doubt the most contentious issue in straight criminal law over the past 30 years. It's not a great model for anything.</p>
<p>(One of the controversial aspects of RICO, too, is its mixed criminal-civil approach, where the civil aspects -- which have been very broadly interpreted -- are often much more punitive than the criminal sanctions.)</p>
<p>Thinking about this last night, I was reminded of my criminal law professor. He was politically conservative, and generally a nasty person -- the absolute opposite of a fuzzy liberal. He was something of an expert on drug laws, and had been appointed by Governer Reagan to head a commission to re-write California's drug laws. At one point, he was approached by a criminal defense attorney who wanted him to represent the guy's client on appeal. The client had been caught with twenty pounds or so of marijuana he had grown, and had been convicted of being a drug dealer. But the then-current California statute only applied to cannibis sativa, and the guy had biological proof that what he had grown was a different species of cannibis. (Not that it contained less THC or anything, just that it was a different, more obscure species.) Anyway, my professor had represented the defendant on appeal and got the conviction thrown out -- maybe the only time in his career that he worked for a defendant. He said that for him it wasn't a tough decision at all -- the only moral choice was to uphold the law as written, and then make certain it got re-written the right way.</p>
<p>Lots of attention gets devoted to ideological splits in the courts, but that tends to disguise the fairly narrow range of issues which are subject to good-faith disagreement on the basis of ideology within our legal system. Look, the U.S. Supreme Court has be sharply divided ideologically for 35 years, and the way its jurisdiction works ensures that only the most controversial cases get heard by it. Yet, year in and year out, more than half of its cases are decided unanimously or with only one or two dissents. For lower appellate courts, the percentage of unanimous decisions is much, much higher. Mainstream legal culture makes it easy for people to agree on a wide range of legal issues. And the one in this case is one of those.</p>
<p>Well, JHS gave us more of the statute than the article did, and it includes a list of "places" where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy. While it's not exclusive, it's a fair inference that the statute isn't meant to apply to acts that occur in public places. It's hard to believe that there isn't another crime that this action could fit under.</p>
