Prosecutor gets 18 months for raping teen boy

Despite the fact that the two situations you are comparing both center around teenagers and legal handling of their responsibility, they are very different.

Underage teens are considered adults in many murder trials because what is being judged is whether they understood, as adults are expected to, that murder is wrong. I know this may sound strange to you; six-year-olds know that murder is wrong. But six-year-olds only know that murder is wrong because 'it's a bad thing to do'. They don't understand the full implications of taking someone's life, ending any future that person may have had, and causing immeasurable suffering to that person's friends and family. A well-adjusted teenager understands these things.

An underage teen is not considered capable of giving consent to an adult because it is not dependent on understanding facts or reality, but rather the ability to control and understand their own emotions. The average 16-year-old understands the act of sex, but they simply don't have the emotional stability that an adult does, making coercion a very real problem. Even if the adult did not mean to coerce the underage teen into sex, because the adult is more in control of their emotions and more able to make decisions despite their emotions it is still like asking a six-year-old to play chess with a 20-year-old. Even if though they might understand how the pieces move, they are just not as capable of seeing a few moves ahead, of seeing the effect one move will have on other moves and pieces. There are obviously some cases of, going along with my analogy, 6-year-old chess prodigies and 20-year-olds who are playing their first game of chess. These cases are rare, and it's true the law does not take these into account. Personally I feel it's good that courts do it this way, because until we have a way to consistently and correctly evaluate such things a lot more harm could be done by assuming teens are emotionally as capable and stable as adults.

/r/news Thread Parent Link - usatoday.com