Florida tried to outlaw teen sexting and accidentally legalized it instead


It sounds like Florida's the place to be if you're a kid looking to send risqué Snapchats.
While some places, like this town in Illinois, have prosecuted sexting teens as child pornographers (yes, the teens are both the child and the pornographer in this scenario), Florida legislators attempted to take a more measured approach to the issue. So they created a sliding scale of consequences, ramping up from a civil infraction on the first sexting offense all the way to a felony on the fourth offense.
The problem with this system was noticed only when the state tried to enforce the law: In Florida, courts don't have any jurisdiction over civil infractions by juveniles. This means the first sexting offense can never be prosecuted, which means the ramping up of consequences can therefore never occur. No doubt Florida Man was thrilled to hear about this legislative mishap.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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