We cannot, by total reliance on law, escape the duty to judge right and wrong… There are good laws and there are occasionally bad laws, and it conforms to the highest traditions of a free society to offer resistance to bad laws, and to disobey them.
~ Alexander Bickel
Should a paedophile who believes laws criminalising sex with children are bad laws be free to ignore those laws? How about a racist who believes it is not murder to kill someone of another race? Everyone is free to break what they perceive to be a bad law. Or even to break other laws in pursuit of various causes. However, if they get caught, they must expect that the law will be enforced and that they will suffer the consequences. If the law is regarded as bad by enough of their fellow citizens it may ultimately be changed, and they may or may not, more probably not, be exonerated.
Now we have to define ‘paedophile’.
By “today’s” laws, my father was one. (He well over 20 and mom under 18 when they got married.)
By the laws of the day there was nothing wrong with what they did. (Some interesting stories from his mother-in-law about this young G.I. dating her daughter and sleeping on her couch.)
Which law is/was ‘bad’ – now or then?
Assuming your mum was over 16 then which law is bad now depends on where they were living (and in most states there would be no problem).
I suspect that “paedophile” is best left referring to much younger children and not caught up in the somewhat odd – or anyway out of line with the rest of the world – definitions of the age of consent in some American states. Mind you, the rest of the world, is not always a good standard (Japanese federal law’s 13 is too low).
“Mind you, the rest of the world, is not always a good standard (Japanese federal law’s 13 is too low).”
And perhaps the Japanese think our laws are set way too high? 😉
And there’s the fun bit with far too many laws – different areas have different set points – or it isn’t even considered a problem, legal one place and illegal in the next.
My stories dive into all this in places, having to deal with thinking and ways that doesn’t match what you might have been taught; and ‘think of the children’ is uttered as a curse at those too busy trying to childproof the world to ever bother trying to world-proof the children.
Methinks I perceive a wee flaw in Mister Bickel’s advice: Who is to judge which law is bad and which good? Fashion changes and tastes vary. ‘Tis so with clothes. How not with law? A thorny knot indeed that is not easily untied.
I’d rather deal with an outdated law enforced rigidly than rely on the kindness of strangers and the whims of a judge.
Not that I would enjoy either but there is value in certainty.
Once upon a time, I had a case before a judge whom I did not know. I asked an old campaigner about him. The OC said, “He follows the law.” Best compliment I ever heard.
The one group who can judge is a jury.
Jury nullification is a concept where members of a trial jury find a defendant not guilty if they do not support a government’s law, do not believe it is constitutional or humane, or do not support a possible punishment for breaking the law.
Judges hate it but – for all the instructions they might give – the jury can really do whatever they like. Sometimes this can be a very good thing – see the Bushell case – but it is also behind not guilty verdicts in trials in the Anerican south where civil rights campaigners were murdered (though in those cases the judge was often complicit).