Now by contrast, in your example, the pedophile fetishist doesn't believe that his girlfriend is actually underage; it's just a scene they do, so he may have a bad state of mind (to want to have sex with underage girls), but a bad state of mind isn't enough for criminal liability without a bad act. The way he thinks things are is that he's enacting his desire to have sex with a 13 year old by pretending that his 18+ girlfriend, who he know to be over 18, is 13. Far from being criminal, that's probably a really good way to for someone with paedophilic inclinations to deal with those desires, if it works for him.
It's like someone who hates you and actually wants to kill you expressing his desire to kill you by shooting at you with what he knows to be an unloaded gun. That's not attempted murder -- it's assault, probably, if _you_ don't know the gun is unloaded, but that is a much lesser crime.
The tricky thing is that one takes the bad act to be not the act that the actor actually did, but the act he believed he was doing if things were as he wrongly imagined. Unfortunately, btw, this does not work as a defense to statutory rape -- even the boy believes the girl is of age, and would not have sex with her if he thought she was not, he's liable if she's not of age anyway.
--- ravi <ravi at platosbeard.org> wrote:
> On 30 Aug, 2007, at 23:41 PM, andie nachgeborenen
> wrote:
> >
> > Btw the thing with its being crime, or a worse
> one, to
> > send lewd pix to an adult when you think it's a
> minor
> > (or a subminor -- 13, not 14, whatever) goes to
> the
> > legal doctrine that the crime is in doing or
> > attempting to do what you thought was the bad
> thing,
> > even if you failed to do it or you couldn't have
> done
> > it because, for example, the object of your
> attentions
> > wasn't as young as you thought.
> >
> > Likewise, it's still attempted murder to shoot
> (at)
> > someone with an unloaded gun, as long as you
> thought
> > it was loaded and meant to kill them by shooting
> it.
> > That's not crazy, is it?
> >
>
> I have a different version of the question: what if
> X and his
> girlfriend Y (both above 21 and aware of that
> detail) have a
> pedophilia (approp word?) fetish and act out X (as
> an adult) having
> sex with Y (playing a 13 year old)? Does this
> demonstrate that X
> wants to have sex with a 13 year old? In which case,
> is he guilty by
> law?
>
> --ravi
>
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