U.S. Judge Rules Sexual Trafficking Is Not a Violent Crime

9-1-15 National:

While Congress and the Department of Justice have both said that victims of sexual trafficking are likely to be treated violently, a U.S. judge has inexplicably ruled otherwise.

Sex trafficking is not a crime of violence.

At least that is the conclusion of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which tossed out this August (PDF) a pimp’s conviction for “possession and use of a firearm in relation to a crime of violence.” The crime of violence in question was sex trafficking.

Unfortunately, the statute defining that firearm crime, known as section 924(c), has been criticized as one of federal law’s most enigmatic thanks to its “bramble of prepositional phrases.” Senior Judge Andre Davis, who wrote the ruling, must have gotten stuck in the bramble. He overlooked that sex trafficking is a violent trespass on human beings’ bodies, particularly women’s bodies.

The court, Judge Davis wrote, was “not persuaded that the ordinary case of sex trafficking by force, fraud, or coercion involves a substantial risk that the defendant will use physical force as a means to commit the offense.”

The pimp, German de Jesus Ventura, was also convicted of “sex trafficking by force, fraud, or coercion.” That conviction, along with convictions on five related counts and a 30-year prison sentence, stands. What did not survive the appeal was his 924(c) firearm conviction and the mandatory additional five-year prison sentence the statute imposes. ..Continued.. by Andrew Mark Bennett