You can finally breathe.
An age old, looming question has been officially resolved.
A California appellate court panel based in Santa Ana this month settled the question about whether French kissing is inherently a sex act.
It is, according to the court.
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The issue arose when John Stuart Moses challenged the legitimacy of his
sex crimes conviction for his intimate relationship with a 13-year-old
Anaheim girl he met at VampireFreaks.com.
Moses, who was 23 at
the time of the incidents, avoided a conviction in his first trial after
claiming that the girl was to blame because she repeatedly lied by
claiming she was 18 years old, an assertion also contained on her
MySpace.com profile.
The girl also claimed that they had engaged in
oral sex and intercourse in the back seat of a parked car; Moses
insisted they'd only French kissed.
But prosecutor Robert
Mestman in the Orange County District Attorney's office won a conviction
for lewd conduct with a minor in a retrial and Superior Court Judge
David A. Thompson sentenced Moses to a punishment of three years' of
formal probation after suspending a 365-day jail term.
The appellate court considered and rejected Moses' claim that there was insufficient evidence to convict him and that French kissing isn't sex.
“We
conclude that evidence of making out and French kissing for an extended
period of time in the backseat of a car parked in a dark parking lot is
sufficient to prove the intent to gratify sexual desires necessary to
[violate California's sex crimes laws],” wrote Justice Richard Fybel on
behalf of his colleagues, justices Richard Aronson and Raymond Ikola.
But the justices did side with Moses on his complaints that certain probation rules issued routinely by Orange County court officials are unconstitutional.
He'd been banned from working as a massage therapist (upheld), marrying anyone with kids under 18 (overturned), frequenting places where kids congregate (upheld), using sexually explicit materials (upheld), contacting anyone inside a vehicle (overturned) and hitchhiking (upheld).
Go HERE to read my original coverage of the case, When Is It Not A Crime To Hook Up with A Seventh Grader?
–R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.