Kaitlyn Hunt and her father Steve, who said: 'For my daughter's sexual preferences, she's getting two felony charges.' Photograph: APHere's an inconvenient truth about the Kaitlyn Hunt case — the one in Florida where an 18-year-old faces a "lewd and lascivious battery" felony charge for having had a consensual sexual relationship with her 14-year-old girlfriend. Note that it's also routine for 18-year-olds to be charged with "L&L" for having heterosexual sex with their 14-year-old partners in Florida and across the United States, usually at the bequest of the younger person's angry parents, as happened in the Hunt case. And have their lives ruined, as Kaitlyn's appears about to be, by pleading out to theoretically "lesser" felony charges.
My first thought when I heard about the case was that it was too ridiculous to move forward in the courts, or that Kaitlyn's legal prospects couldn't possibly be as grim as her supporters made them out to be. After all, the sex was consensual. Everyone knows that high school seniors and freshman date. And really, who destroys a teenager's dream of becoming a nurse or teacher or business owner, let alone puts them on a sex offender's registry, for going out with a former classmate and high school basketball teammate? Wasn't this the kind of thing that the parents of the younger woman would drop the moment they realized that everyone was looking at them like aliens from the Planet Homophobe for going on the rampage just because their daughter likes girls in 2013?
But I was wrong. Really wrong. Kaitlyn's now ensnared in the Florida criminal justice system. And like many other 18-year-olds before her, gay and straight, she faces the same possibilities for truly deep and scarring harm.
Bruce Colton, the State Attorney for Indian River County in Florida, says that if she pleads out to the lesser felony charge of "child abuse" that he's offered, he'll recommend that she serve two years under house arrest and one year probation, and she'll be spared registering as a sex offender. As attorney Jason Cobb says:
"True, the state can offer her that plea. And if the judge withholds adjudication of guilt, she technically won't be a convicted felon. But the felony arrest for lewd and lascivious conduct and her 'no contest' plea to the lesser included offense of child abuse will always show up on any standard basic criminal background check."
In short, if Kaitlyn takes the lesser plea, Florida's penal code mandates that she'll be stuck with a record that she can never have sealed or expunged, one that could scuttle her dreams every time an employer or educational institution does a background check.
It's almost impossible to imagine that Kaitlyn's lawyer will let her go to trial. Because it doesn't matter what all of Kaitlyn's hundreds of thousands of supporters on Twitter or Facebook or Change.org think in criminal court. Kaitlyn would almost inevitably be convicted, given that she's already admitted to having sexual relations with her girlfriend, and could face up to nine years in prison. That plus a place on the sex offender registry, a true "future killer".
That's the phrase Cobb uses, and he should know: he's one of Florida's leading attorney when it comes to getting his clients, male and female, taken off of the Florida sex offender registry under the terms of the state's 2007 "Romeo and Juliet" statute – so-called because it refers to cases of consensual sex between a minor and someone within four years of their age who has no prior criminal record. Of the 241 names that have been removed in the past six years, Cobb has represented 40. And of those cases, he said, "70% involve 18-year-olds who have had sex with 14-or 15-year-olds".
The only chance that all of this will go away entirely, leaving Kaitlyn with a clean record, is if Colton drops all charges. And the chances of Colton, an elected official, doing that are virtually nil. Not with Kaitlyn's admission of guilt and the younger girlfriend's parents adamant that Kaitlyn "be held responsible in some way".
Beneath this tragedy is a structural flaw. As Laura Lindberg, a senior research associate for the Guttmacher Institute said:
"My heart goes out to any High School principal trying to monitor or even educate their students about this issue. Because we're partly responsible for this: when we put students ages 14 to 18 together in the same educational setting, it's short sighted of us to be shocked by the outcome. What's legal in the fall, when you're 17-years-old may not be legal in the spring when you turn 18."
The story of Kaitlyn Hunt and other young people like her is a story about the utter inability of this country's adults to come to grips with adolescent sexuality in ways that do something other than criminalize it. And how utterly shortchanged our youth are by our failure.
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