Here’s a lede, courtesy of the Associated Press, you don’t read everyday: “Police in Virginia on Thursday backed off efforts to take sexually explicit photos of a 17-year-old to prove a sexting case against him.” And that rethink by Virginia police is a good thing because they had seemed to completely lose touch with reality when, in order to prove felony pornography charges against the teen for sexting his then-15-year-old girlfriend, they hatched a plan to “inject the teen with an arousal-causing substance so they can photograph his naked, erect genitals.”
As you would expect, once news of the idea got out, people were appalled. “Manassas City [Virginia] Manager Patrick Pate acknowledged Thursday that the department and the city had been fielding irate calls from across the country and internationally after the story broke,” the AP reports. The police had even obtained a search warrant to carry out the whole thing, but on Thursday they decided maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all. “We are not going to serve the search warrant,” Virginia police Lt. Brian Larkin told the Los Angeles Times on Thursday.
