Currently there are national laws which the federal government enforces. This is mostly related to drugs and financial crime though the FBI handels stuff like kidnappings. Each one of the 50 states are allowed to make their own criminal law codes and enforce as they please as long as they don't contradict national laws or the constitution. I don't like this system and believe we should have a single national law code that both state and federal authorities have to enforce.
In many states not Florida there are exceptions allowing someone under a certain age to break the consent laws as long as certain conditions apply. Most of the northern states have these. The southern and midwestern states do not. I am not making a case for consent laws to be changed specifically but I think it is time we brought those two parts of the country into the 21 century by enforcing a national legal code that they can not let their silly little rural selves tinker with. I really don't care about their states right since they only scream about those when it comes to people telling them they cannot make blacks and gays lives horrible. So- we should have a national criminal code that is written using liberal values.In a statement released Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida condemned the statutory rape prosecution of 18-year-old Kaitlyn Hunt.
“The facts as we understand them suggest that the state is prosecuting Kaitlyn for engaging in behavior that is both fairly innocuous and extremely common,” the organization said.
Kaitlyn Ashley Hunt of Sebastian, Florida was arrested in February on two counts of lewd or lascivious battery on child because of her lesbian relationship with a 15-year-old classmate. Kaitlyn’s parents have admitted the two teens “had ONE mutual consenting sexual experience,” but blamed the arrest on the younger girl’s “bigoted” parents.
Despite a public outcry, a Florida state attorney said he would not drop the case.
“Such behavior occurs every day in tens of thousands of high schools across the country, yet those other students are not facing felony convictions (and, in Florida, the lifetime consequences of a felony conviction) and potential lifelong branding as sex offenders,” the ACLU said.
“This is a life sentence for behavior by teenagers that is all too common, whether they are male or female, gay or straight. High-school relationships may be fleeting, but felony convictions are not.”
