Former U.N. weapons inspector in Monroe County Court on sex sting charges

[Freddie Stubbs]

Source: Pocono Record

A Monroe County judge heard arguments this morning to dismiss Internet-related sexual offense charges against former United Nations chief weapons inspector Scott Ritter.

Ritter, who lives near Albany, N.Y., appeared in court for the proceedings but said nothing. His lawyers presented Monroe County Court Judge Jennifer Sibum with several motions: to dismiss the case or, failing that, change the venue for a trial that is set to begin next month.

Sibum reserved decision. She is expected to make a ruling next week after defense attorneys and prosecutors submit written briefs.

Ritter is charged with contacting who he thought was a 15-year-old girl in an online chat room in February 2009 and starting a sexually based conversation. The “girl” turned out to be a Barrett Township police officer working undercover.

Read more: http://www.poconorecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100831/NEWS/100839971

[Lightning Count]

1. Isn't legal age 15 in Canada? nt

[awoke_in_2003]

9. Even if so, what the hell does that matter? nt

[Lightning Count]

15. See post 16 for why. nt

[awoke_in_2003]

21. oh, so...

"old enough to bleed is old enough to breed" is now a valid excuse for child molestation? That is really pathetic.

[Lightning Count]

24. Post 16 gave the best response, nt

[awoke_in_2003]

39. no it isn't the best response...

underage is underage- it is illegal to attempt to fuck girls under the age of consent. I have to ask- are you a Roman Polanski fan?

[Freddie Stubbs]

25. He is being tried in Pennsylvania, not Canada

[SILVER__FOX52]

2. Fuck this shit. The Conservatives use this horse shit to distract

Our government is a joke.

[grantcart]

5. this is his third arrest

The first two were before 9/11


Ritter was arrested in April 2001<31> and again in June 2001<32><33> in connection with police stings in which officers posed as under-aged girls to arrange meetings of a sexual nature. The first incident did not lead to any charges.<31> He was charged with a misdemeanor crime of "attempted endangerment of the welfare of a child" after the second, but charges were dropped and the record was sealed on condition that he avoid further trouble for a period of time.<31><34> News of the arrests became public after sealed court records were anonymously provided to the press. Ritter claimed that the timing of the leak was a politically motivated effort to distract attention from his statements about Iraq.<32><33><35>



In this case Ritter says that he 'didn't know her age'. If you have been arrested twice on the same kind of thing don't you think you would make sure you knew a girls age? Wouldn't you want to see an ID?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Ritter

[daleo]

14. I wonder why they dropped the charges the other two times?

If it is a crime now, it should have been a crime then. It may be that this is a difficult charge to make stick (pun not intended).

[awoke_in_2003]

10. he is a serial child predator...

if the cops busted him three times, how many times do you think he was successful?

[wtmusic]

3. Entrapment.

What was that you said about war crimes, Scott? Nothing? My mistake.

[Name removed]

4. Deleted message

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[lobodons]

6. Why isn't it illegal

for someone to pretend to be 15 while online making guys horny? I'm not talking about entrapment illegal, but rather just being involved in an underage sexual related chat type of illegal? Seems to me they both should be charged. Actually, if no one involved is underage nobody should be charged if you think about it.

[davidinalameda]

11. if you're an adult

a 15 year old SHOULDN'T make you horny

[superconnected]

12. My nieces both got preggers when they were 15

15 year olds have full grown bodies. Many are out fooling around at that age. My sister accused one of my nieces boyfriends of rape because he was 20 and my sister didn't like him.

I'm more worried when someone finds a child in an under developed body sexy - ie a 10 year old - now that's sickening beyond belief - but 15? Try again, I was full grown by 15, don't know about you. That's a woman body with the brain of a child. But, still understandable that a guy would find a full grown female body sexy. Not understandable he would act on it knowing her age though.

[davidinalameda]

20. girls are entering puberty at a younger age

so you do have girls who are 10 and 11 who are "women"

does that make it okay for an adult male, someone who is probably old enough to the girl's grandfather, to be attracted to her just because she's able to bear children?

and a 15 year old girl is NOT a full-grown female

certainly not mentally full-grown and thus unable to enter into any sort of consensual relationship with someone who is supposedly an adult mentally

it is not acceptable in our society to lust after a girl of 15

anyway, a girl generally does not stop growing until she's close to 18

[AngryAmish]

26. Some 15 year old girls have stopped growing

Otherwise, we agree. 15 is too young - even if fully grown.

[proteus_lives]

23. Ritter is 49 years old.

If your 15 year-old daughter brought a 49 year-old man home, you'd have no problem with him banging away at her?

[slackmaster]

32. That's unfortunate. Having kids that young can severely limit a person's choices in life.

I hope they and their children are doing well.

[TheMadMonk]

16. And yet another individual so certain of their absolute morality that history,...

...biology and reality must be ignored.

Older men have been tupping much younger girls (or in some societies boys) for as long as there have been old men and nubile young girls.

Nature, red in tooth and claw, really only cares only that there be a next generation. Turf on the wicket? (Pick your tasteless euphenism.) Game on.

[awoke_in_2003]

38. It does not matter...

it is against the law.

[No Elephants]

34. You think lying about your age online should be a crime?

[slackmaster]

7. Nice to see you, Mr. Ritter.

[Lightning Count]

8. "Quite the romeo aren't you." nt

[PSPS]

13. This is "thought crime" pure and simple.

There was no "15-year-old" at all.

[JI7]

17. he took steps to make contact, and he has done this before

[PSPS]

19. Again, there was no "15-year-old girl" to contact. This is thought crime.

[karynnj]

27. This is a pretty standard way to catch internet preditors

Now, all of us know the internet comic that has a dog typing with a thought bubble saying "that on the internet no one knows that I'm a dog". Here, though, what the police are doing, is similar to using undercover cops to combat prostitution.

There, they have cops who are dressed to look like prostitutes frequenting areas where they are. On the internet - it is easier, they define themselves as young girls. They catch people who really are targeting young girls. The fact that some here do not think that should be a crime doesn't mean it isn't.

Here, it is likely that Ritter has a real problem. Even if you think he was a hero speaking against there being WMD, his actions here, if true are reprehensible. People are complex. Even on WMD, his speaking the truth was undercut by him having in the late 1990s and 2000 argued strongly that Clinton was ignoring these very real WMD. As he had no new information in 2002 - as no inspectors were in since 1998, his target audience (Congress) had to discount his words - knowing he lied one of the two times.

[reorg]

29. They catch people, they are predators

In an interesting article, Mark Bowden of Vanity Fair explored how some of these sting operations work.

A Crime of Shadows
After months of prowling Internet chat rooms, posing as the mother of two young daughters, Detective Michele Deery thought she had a live one: “parafling,” a married, middle-aged man who claimed he wanted to have sex with her kids. But was he just playing a twisted game of seduction? Both the policewoman and her target give the author their versions of the truth, in a case that challenges the conventional wisdom about online sexual predators, and blurs the lines among crime, “intent,” and enticement.

(...) Justice Byron White wrote: “In their zeal to enforce the law ... Government agents may not originate a criminal design, implant in an innocent person’s mind the disposition to commit a criminal act, and then induce commission of the crime so that the Government may prosecute.” The justices did not address either the subjective or objective tests directly, but they made it clear that predisposition alone did not mean guilt, particularly if the crime was suggested by police to begin with.

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2009/12/sexual-predators-200912?currentPage=3

[PSPS]

33. No it's not. It's a standard way to make headlines and justify a budget. This is thought crime.

If I'm at a party and I hit on an 18-year-old woman who could pass for 15, where's the crime? Even if she claims to be 15, where's the crime? Even if we have sex, where's the crime?

You see, there is no crime. Your delicate sensibilities may be offended, but that doesn't make it a crime.

[slackmaster]

28. Have you ever watched Dateline NBC's "To Catch A Predator"?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10912603/

[No Elephants]

35. Taking an action for the purpose of commiting a crime is not a thought crime.

[proteus_lives]

22. He's a predator, fuck him.

[Nihil]

30. Hope you're over 15 with that invitation ...

:hide:

[reorg]

31. Sexual Fascism in Progressive America

Progressives in America are rightly concerned about increasing signs of fascism in this country, such as a so-called war on terrorism that allows massive invasion of privacy and wholesale imprisonment without charge; such as state manufacture of propaganda for its own people; such as the assertion that anyone who challenges government policies on these matters is a traitor; such as a "great leader" who puts himself clearly above and outside the law. They ought to be concerned also about another sign of the demise of American justice and human decency: scapegoating. One sign of fascism has always been the creation of a scapegoated class whom people are taught to fear and hate, and whose very existence demands a totalitarian state apparatus of surveillance and control. A class whom no-one would dare defend.

Progressives in America are rightly concerned about increasing signs of fascism in this country, such as a so-called war on terrorism that allows massive invasion of privacy and wholesale imprisonment without charge; such as state manufacture of propaganda for its own people; such as the assertion that anyone who challenges government policies on these matters is a traitor; such as a "great leader" who puts himself clearly above and outside the law. They ought to be concerned also about another sign of the demise of American justice and human decency: scapegoating. One sign of fascism has always been the creation of a scapegoated class whom people are taught to fear and hate, and whose very existence demands a totalitarian state apparatus of surveillance and control. A class whom no-one would dare defend.

http://www.cfcamerica.org/news-stories/2060-sexual-fascism-in-progressive-america

Imaginary Numbers

During the past 15 years, as the Internet has made inroads into every facet of modern life, the fear of online child predation has grown far out of proportion to the actual problem. The belief that sexual deviants by the tens of thousands are prowling the Internet in search of children to entice and corrupt, and that their ranks are increasing rapidly, has won broad popular acceptance. The most widely cited statistic is “one in five,” as in the number of children who have supposedly been approached by a sexual predator on the Internet. The origin of this figure is the Department of Justice’s National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, which first reported it in 2001. Five years later the center amended the result to one in seven, but by either measure the figure suggests nothing less than an epidemic.

Until you look closer. The actual question posed in the department’s “Youth Internet Safety” survey asked teenagers under 17 if they had received an “unwanted sexual solicitation,” which was defined as follows: “a request to engage in sexual activities or sexual talk or give personal sexual information that was unwanted or, whether wanted or not, made by an adult.” Since “adult” in this case was defined as anyone 17 or older, the definition included many would-be high-school Romeos, predators of a highly conventional and not particularly dangerous sort, and also took in a strain of intimate gossip familiar to all teenage girls. As the study’s authors themselves noted, half the solicitations came from other teenagers. Not a single solicitation led to actual sexual contact. Violent sexual predators hunting children are out there, as they have always been, yet they remain blessedly rare, and most young people flee such strangeness instinctively. Only 3 percent of the contacts reported in the survey resembled the one most feared by parents, the adult stranger attempting to seduce a child.

Benjamin Radford, the managing editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, has noted instance after instance of the “one in five” figure and other kinds of misinformation on network broadcasts. On April 18, 2005, CBS reporter Jim Acosta declared on the evening news, “When a child is missing, chances are good it was a convicted sex offender.” Radford responds, “Acosta is incorrect: if a child goes missing, a convicted sex offender is actually among the least likely explanations, far behind runaways, family abductions, and the child being lost or injured.”

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2009/12/sexual-predators-200912?currentPage=3

[proteus_lives]

36. So, looking for little girls on the internet is ok? Is that what you're saying?

[reorg]

37. I'd say making slanderous allegations is not ok

So far, you have yet to substantiate your allegation that he "took steps" to contact a minor, let alone to molest her.

The alleged danger of "predators" targeting vulnerable persons via chatrooms and the like is definitely blown out of all proportion by certain interested parties. Personally, I doubt that it even exists.

[JI7]

18. the Guy has a problem, not everything is a Conspiracy