Outside the Beltway

North Carolina Teen Charged As A Sex Offender For Having Naked Pictures Of Himself

A teenager in North Carolina is facing serious criminal charges in another absurd overreaction to teenager "sexting."

Doug Mataconis · Sunday, September 6, 2015 · 16 comments

Reason’s Robby Soave passes along the story of a 17 year-old boy in North Carolina who faces a possible future as a registered sex offender because he had a nude picture on his smartphone, a nude picture of himself:

Fayetteville, North Carolina, cops have charged 17-year-old Cormega Copening with sexual exploitation of a minor—his girlfriend, who is the same age—because the couple sent each other nude photos of themselves during their relationship.

There’s no evidence the photos were ever sent to anyone else, and police only became aware of them because they searched Copening’s phone for unrelated reasons that haven’t been specified. Even so, the teen—formerly the starting quarterback at his high school—faces decades on the Sex Offender Registry and up to ten years behind bars if convicted. He’s also been benched from the team while Jack Britt High School investigates the matter.

Copening’s girlfriend—who remains unnamed in the news articles—is also facing charges, ABC11 reported.

These teen-sexting witch hunts are almost always outrageous; they conflate child pornography with something far less sinister. It’s perfectly normal—and wildly common—for kids to express an interest in sex. Should authority figures discourage underage sexting? Sure. Should they ruin kids’ lives for doing it anyway? Absolutely not.

But Copening’s situation is more outrageous than most. As far as I can tell, the pictures weren’t shared with anyone else—this isn’t a case where a boy texted a girl’s nude photos to all of his friends and caused her some considerable public humiliation. The photos were private, and remained that way, until the cops got hold of them. If there’s public humiliation here, police intervention is the cause.

Consider as well that Copening reciprocated with photos of his own. Does not a mutual, voluntary exchange of photos undercut the notion that “sexual exploitation” is a factor here? It’s more than a little ridiculous to accuse these two of exploiting each other—although this is precisely what the authorities are doing, I presume (the specific charges against the girlfriend were not reported).

Lastly, it bears repeating that these teens were 17. If they had waited until they were 18 to send the photos, no crime would have occurred. Eighteen-year-olds are recognized as fully-autonomous sexual adults. Kylie Jenner, who just turned 18, has been inundated with requests to make a sex tape (indeed, filmmakers began making these requests even before she turned 18). The law, by its very nature, permits no nuance: you are 18, or you’re not. But it’s ridiculous to think that teens are magically transformed into adults on their 18th birthday. Many of them—perhaps Copening and his girlfriend—might be ready for mature relationships that involve sex (or, at least, sexy pictures) prior to the government’s randomly-selected date

In a follow-up report, Soave reports additional details about the case that make law enforcement’s actions here even more egregious:

North Carolina is one of two states in the country (the other is progressive New York) that considers 16 to be the age of adulthood for criminal purposes. This mean, of course, that Copening can be tried as an adult for exploiting a minor—himself.

I discovered this when I asked Fayetteville Observer Executive Editor Mike Adams about his publication’s decision to release the names of the teens (something countless other local news reports did as well). He explained to me that it’s the company’s policy to publish the names of adults charged with felony crimes, which includes Copening and Denson, in this case. But The Observer didn’t fully comprehend that Copening and Denson were also the victims—and, by some bizarre quirk of the law, minors in a different sense—until after its original reporting on the issue had already been published.

“I don’t think sexting was considered when this sexual exploitation law was put on the books,” Adams told me.

Indeed. Maybe the legislature should revisit the issue. In the meantime, there is still no excuse for local cops to pursue charges against Copening. They have already humiliated him and damaged (perhaps irreversibly) his high school football career over mildly worrisome behavior that should not even constitute a crime. Cumberland County should exercise some discretion—perhaps some maturity as well—and let this matter go.

Since Copening’s girlfriend is a minor, the crimes he is charged with would seem to carry with them the potential that he could be required to register under the state’s sex offender registry program for at least some period of time, much of which would cover the early years of his adulthood and therefore have a tremendous impact on his future, his athletic career, and his ability to get into college or get a job. The fact that he is charged as an adult would seem to indicate that, at least for the time being, prosecutors intend on pushing for conviction that would required him to enter registry as well. Even if these offenses fell short of the crimes that would require Copening to enter the registry if her were convicted or plead guilty, though, they are still incredibly outrageous. The fact that the pictures were mutual seems to indicate quite strongly that there was absolutely no sexual exploitation involved at all. Obviously, these were two teenagers in a romantic relationship who sent each other sexually provocative pictures. A stupid decision, perhaps, but hardly one that should constitute a crime, especially given the fact that it wouldn’t even be a crime at all if they had waited however many months it might be until they reach their eighteenth birthdays to do it. Finally, the fact that the pictures were discovered during a search of the teens’ phones without a warrant makes the entire incident questionable to say the least.

There’s nothing new about this type of case, of course, and we’ve seen many examples in recent years of teenagers being charged with serious sex-related offenses for something as seemingly innocuous as taking a picture with a smartphone and other activities that clearly don’t rise to the level of the kind of offenses that these registries were meant to cover. There was a case very similar to Copening’s, as a matter fact, in Virginia just last year involving a teenager boy who was charged with production and possession of child pornography because he sent a nude picture to his girlfriend. In that case police and prosecutors had applied to the court to force the teen to undergo a medial procedure so they could take pictures of his genitals for “evidence.” After an uproar that went nationwide, though, prosecutors dropped that plan and the case was resolved in a way that avoided leaving any serious criminal charges on the teen’s record. Earlier this year, a group of teens in Illinois was slapped with child pornography charges over a consensually recorded video that they distributed among themselves.  And these are only the incidents that received enough national attention to make the news beyond their local jurisdiction.  In a search on Google, I found reports of similar incidents in Fairfax County, Virginia, Michigan, and Florida.

Laws against child pornography and the sexual exploitation of minors exist for good reasons, as  Elizabeth Nolan Brown notes, they exist to prevent the sexual exploitation of children by adults. The crimes carry with them harsh penalties including long the prospect of long jail time and the requirement that those convicted register as a sex offender after they are released. The registries themselves also exist for a good reason, to inform the public when there are people with a record of violent sex offenses and offenses against children living in the neighborhood. Where those registries have gone off the track, is in the fact that the types of offenses that require defendants to report to the registry keeps expanding, and the law allows neither police, prosecutors, nor Judges very much discretion in determining who will be required to register. Copening’s case, along with all the other cases involving teen “sexting” are an excellent example of how the registries have become far too blunt an instrument.

The idea behind the registries has been that they are necessary to protect the public at large, and especially children, from those who could be a danger to them by making them aware when such people live near them. That danger simply doesn’t exist in that cast majority of these cases, though. Instead, what you typically have a teenagers and their curiousity about sexuality combined with technology that makes it very easy to share pictures, video, and whatnot. Sharing nude pictures of yourself even with your boyfriend or girlfriend is admittedly a dumb thing to do when you’re a teenager, or an adult for matter, given how it easy it could be for those pictures to become public. Just because it’s a dumb thing to do, though, that doesn’t mean it should be treated as a criminal matter. Instead, parents and school authorities need to educate children about the dangers and consequences of combining their perfectly normal interest in sex with technology that makes it possible for any image to go around in the world in a matter of hours. Unless their was abuse, or a lack of consent, then it seems to be entirely inappropriate to treat these things as a criminal matter. Hopefully, Copening’s case can be resolved in a manner that doesn’t cause him life long consequences, but cases like his will continue to happen as as long as we use the blunt instrument of the law to handle something that is, at the worst, a disciplinary matter. Five years ago, The New York Times wrote about the then relatively new phenomenon of teen “sexting” and the criminal law issues it was raising. Many of the officials quoted in the article said that we need to rethink how we treat these cases and move away from treating them as criminal matters. Five years later, the case of Cormega Copening shows that we still haven’t learned our lesson and that teens are being harmed.