I recently stumbled across a video on YouTube that showed police in Florida arresting a gentleman from the United Arab Emirates for soliciting a minor online. They indicated that he had a sexually charged conversation with a 14-year-old girl, but they didn't specify whether it was a real 14-year-old girl or a decoy posing as one in an online sex-sting operation.
I'm not going to pretend that this man is a poster child for good behavior, because I cannot deny that he was taking a major role of the dice in trying to meet up with a minor for sexual purposes; when this man was already married and had kids. I agree that the optics of this incident don't look good. However, let's not forget that this girl could have walked away from the online conversation any time that she wished to do so.
Also, if the suspect had gone ahead and had any kind of sex with her, it wouldn't have been the first time any teenage girl ever had sex with anyone. It wasn't as though he was going to grab her into an alley, kicking and screaming, to rape her violently.
Another point I would like to make is that the suspect's actions possibly constitute a cultural misunderstanding in that he is from a Middle Eastern nation where a 14- or 15-year-old girl is no longer considered to be a child. Yes, I get it that he has to honor the letter of the law here in our nation. However, the problem I'm having here is that the police that interrogated him did not completely follow the letter of the law themselves.
Even though the police read this suspect his Miranda rights, they failed to respect his Fifth-Amendment rights under the United States Constitution. Watch the video below from beginning to end to see exactly what I mean.
The Police In Florida Arrest A Foreign National For Attempting To Meet Up With A 14-Year-Old Girl For Sexual Activities
Eventually, in the police interrogation, you'll notice that the suspect asked the two detectives if he could phone the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates so that they could put him in touch with one of their attorneys and that attorney could interpret what these two detectives were discussing with him into Arabic. Now, that sounds to me as though he was asking to speak with an attorney, and right then and there the two police detectives should have shut down the conversation.
In other words, these two police detectives violated this suspect's Fifth-Amendment rights to an attorney. Because they had already Mirandized him, it could only be expected that the judge will likely dismiss this entire criminal case against this suspect on the basis of the police detectives' violations of his Fifth-Amendment rights. I would only hope that the district attorney who receives this case will do the right thing and refuse to prosecute it for these same reasons.
I realize that because I believe that online sex-sting operations are a form of entrapment and should be illegal, I have a bias about the above matter that causes me to be on the side of the suspect. However, even if I were a diehard child advocate, I would still have found the police detectives' actions against him to be way out of line. Like it or not, criminal suspects have rights too.
The suspect kept asking the two detectives again and again if he could call his nation's embassy, and they kept telling him that he could not do so at that very moment and that it would be hours before he would have been able to do so. What made him particularly vulnerable is the fact that he did not know exactly how the criminal justice system and the sex laws work here in the United States of America.
I'm sure that the foreign ministry in the United Arab Emirates will have something to say about this man's criminal indictment in view of the fact that the police completely ignored his Miranda rights after reading them to him. The sex laws here in our nation have become completely outrageous, and elected officials need to change them.
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