Back in October of 2006, I briefly discussed a point about laws prohibiting internet luring.
if its illegal for a 45-year-old accountant with an internet account to be talking naughty to 13-year-old girls, how on earth can it be legal for a 51-year-old police investigator to be online pretending to be the 13-year-old girl. Entrapment laws aside, in the end aren't you busting him for talking dirty to little kids? If he doesn't know that the "little kid" isn't a little kid, would it not be a fairly reasonable defense that he wasn't talking dirty to little kids, but rather talking dirty to other dirty old men who were impersonating little kids? In other words, that he was assuming that there are no 13-year-old girls asking for more pictures of his testicles, but rather even more perverse 51-year-old accountants [or hell, even perverse police investigators! -ed] with cross-dressing and roleplay fantasies. Typically these dirty old men pretend to be young people themselves not when the digital pictures get taken, [I assume -ed], so I don't think it would be too unreasonable to use the "I knew the person I'm talking to is actually an adult who's pretending" defense. After all, the defendant would have been pretending already!
In reality if any of these child molesters who agree to meet the person they're chatting with, and then get busted in a police sting, the first thing they should blurt out when the SWAT team is tasering him (or, if not in Edmonton, the first thing he says when peacefully cuffed by an officer who isn't jacked up on cocaine) is "when do I get to meet the guy I chatted with? Is he hot?"
Well it took a couple of years, but somebody used basically that defense: and it worked!
Michell Rayal Levigne had been accused of Internet luring following a 2006 undercover police sting operation, however he testified in his own defence that he never actually believed the person he was chatting with was 13.The thing to note is that Levigne was right! Even if he did believe it was a 13-year-old-boy, it wasn't. It would be awfully hard to make that charge stick: it would be like being tried in court for the murder of Yahoo! founder George Osbourne while Osbourne himself sat in the benches watching the case. Actus reus: the act must be committed. If there was an actual 13 year old boy chatting on the computer under the observation of an EPS officer a case could be made: but as it is, Levigne isn't guilty because the Crown cannot prove that he was talking to a 13-year-old.
When asked why not, Levigne related two examples of how things are sometimes not the same as advertised and people are not exactly who and what they say they are.
Update, July 15 2010: The Supreme Court has inexplicably upheld the conviction. Its interesting to note how many people observe what Third Edge of the Sword told you four years ago: Levigne never chatted with a 13-year old boy. Yet the Supremes, with a clear cut case of being able to strike down a horribly unwieldy Section 172.1, upheld it. Levigne never took the steps a reasonable person would have taken to determine the age of his chat partner: that's the only way that the top court looked at it, ignoring the fact that if Levigne was psychic and could telepathically determine the exact person he was chatting with, he would have found an Edmonton Police Services officer.
My question remains: how big of a pervert is this cop? I know Edmonton Police aren't known for their adherence to the law or their fine moral standing, but what I want to know is how often did this guy masterbate at night thinking of Michell Levigne's sexually explicit photos?
