A high school football player from North Carolina and his girlfriend were prosecuted on felony charges and charged as adults – for exchanging naked selfies on their phones.
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Corsage Copening, of Fayetteville, North Carolina, was 16 when the explicit snaps were taken and has been forced to strike a deal with prosecutors to avoid being placed on the sex offenders’ list. But he will be on probation for a year, during which he’ll be subject to warrantless searches.
The pictures were discovered when authorities were investigating a wider problem of sexual images allegedly being shared at school without the permission of the subjects involved.
He was prosecuted for having his own and his girlfriend’s image, despite not sharing them further.
Naked pictures were also found on his 16-year-old girlfriend’s cellphone. For one, the 17-year-old has been prosecuted as an adult, even though the sexual exploitation charges rest upon his classification as a minor. In both cases, the teens were considered the minor victim and the adult perpetrator. It turned out he was not involved in the case.
“It’s dysfunctional to be charged with possession of your own image”, he said. “They are trying to make an example of them because it’s believed to be inappropriate behavior”, Fred Lane, a privacy and computer security expert who wrote the book “Cybertraps for Educators“, told The Guardian.
Having the photos is illegal, but if the two were simply having sex, it wouldn’t be, since the age of consent in the state is 16.
“Kids should not be charged for that”, Patchin said.
The boy in question, Cormega Copening, is being named as both the accused and victim in the highly unusual case – as he was only 16 at the time the photos were taken. Often with the intention of combating cyberbullying and child pornography, a growing number of states have recently passed laws to criminalize sexually explicit messages between teens.
In a plea deal which spared him felony charges and sex offender registration, he agreed to two misdemeanour counts of disseminating harmful material to minors.
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Both teenagers must obey the rules of their agreements for a year to have their records wiped clean.
