Yes, and this is due to the fact that possession or transmission of underage pornography is a "strict liability" crime. There is no mitigating factor allowed.
The issue is that your enemies are active, malicious, and clever. No matter what loophole you allow, they will exploit it. So, you close all the loopholes.
And then you wind up with these kinds of pathological situations.
> At the very least be consistent and punish everybody who distributed that video.
These kinds of cases invariably are driven by publicity more than justice--this is the problem with prosecutorial discretion. Normally, they get swept under the rug, but if it hits the media, someone is going to get scapegoated.
But yeah, I don't really follow the reasoning behind this at all. To me it seems like the girl didn't commit a crime (She shared it out of her own volition), but the first person to spread the video _did_ commit a crime.
Otherwise, would 'revenge porn' always be the girls fault for sharing the video first, instead of the ex-boyfriend whom shared it?
While consensual sex may be legal at 16 in Maryland, I suspect that video pornography is not. Making the video probably was illegal prima facie.
A tangential irony is adults engaging sex for money is illegal in most of America, while if it involves a camera, then it's porn and legal.
From a legal perspective, the distinction is considerably more detailed than just camera or not. This is a brief article: https://vistacriminallaw.com/pornography-vs-prostitution-in-...
I knew a longer article, but I can't find it.
Morally speaking, it all boils down to protecting the form of expression. Probably, when the laws were written, there was the idea the sex for money is abhorrent, but freedom of speech needed to be respected. In fact, the core difference of prostitution and porn is that in the former, clients definitely don't want to be filmed, so it kinda makes (I'm not implying that I agree or not).
People like to say that, but it really isn't true.
A very few, very localized areas have specific legal jurisprudence surrounding the production of pornography. Everywhere else, you're probably going to get arrested. And, if the prosecutor decides to try you, you are almost certainly getting jailed. And while you will probably eventually win your appeal, you get the privilege of fighting your appeal from jail in the meantime.
So, while producing pornography may technically be legal everywhere in the US, practically it is only legal in areas that have specific jurisprudence declaring it so.
What didn't get addressed, though, is that that video has also been distributed to almost everybody in the school, without her consent. That means that nearly everybody in that school has distributed child porn. And they are only perpetrators and not victims. Only punishing the one perpetrator who is simultaneously the victim of the crime, is extremely arbitrary and backwards.
At the very least be consistent and punish everybody who distributed that video.