> Where do we draw the line though? If you're about to shoot someone and get stopped last second, should you just walk away free to try once more?

Being caught in the act is different. I guess the equivalent would be to catch them with their pants down with a minor.

> Should we be sending the signal to possible future criminals that "you either succeed in your crime, or you get as many chances to try again as it takes"?

These people, having committed no crime, are not criminals. Putting the basement nerd with socialisation issues in the same bag as actual rapists is about as helpful as saying that a grandad who smoked weed once is like a cartel boss.

> I think intentions, to the extent that we can be reasonably sure of what they are, should be taken into consideration more than the actual outcome of an action.

The main question is “would they have raped a child had they not come across a sting operation”. You can’t punish someone for thinking something.

> The article presents a very one-sided story of some guy who didn't mean any harm to anybody and didn't believe the person he was talking to was really only 13. Assuming that that's really what happened, the poor guy probably learned a lesson and won't be as careless again (asking for some form of ID could have prevented this whole situation).

I thought the article was fairly balanced. It explained why the law came to be written and how traumatic some of the actual assaults are. It also shows how the law is abused to punish people who haven’t done any harm.

The poor guy, as you say, won’t have a second chance, and just had his prospects of doing anything useful in life slashed, and went to serve as profit generator for a prison-operating company. He’s also now much more likely to turn to crime because he can’t have a normal life anymore. He’s also not alone.

There was obviously conflicting information between what the “girl” pretended and what she showed, which is not particularly unexpected if you’ve had any kind of relationship over the internet.

They also arrested him on the doorstep before he had any chance of actually checking, which he claim he was going to do (remember, it’s the Internet, a picture of an id is no more proof than a photo or a profile text).

> The whole point of a trial is to determine an appropriate punishment for a crime that serves to deter others from repeating it. Anything beyond that is just barbarism.

Beating some people into the ground to make an example is barbarism. Particularly if these people are not particularly likely to do what you accuse them of doing. How would it square with the fact that they get harsher sentences than some people who’ve actually harmed genuine children?

This is without even considering that harsher sentences are not much of a deterrent, because the people doing this sort of thing do not expect to get caught, so don’t factor punishment in their risk analysis, if they do any.