Kudos to the Daily Beast for taking issue with a recent court decision that ruled sex trafficking is not a crime of violence. This is something you probably haven't heard about anywhere else in the media.
In August, Senior Judge Andre Davis of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit threw out a charge against one German de Jesus Ventura, a pimp who was originally convicted for the possession and use of a firearm in relation to a crime of violence. What was the crime of violence that firearm could’ve been used for? Sex trafficking.
So how did Judge Davis – appointed to a district court by President Clinton and elevated to the circuit court by President Obama -- come to this conclusion?
As Andrew Mark Bennett of The Daily Beast explains:
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.
Judge Davis said he was not convinced 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.”
Seriously?!
Ventura still has a 30-year prison sentence for five accounts of “sex trafficking by force, fraud, or coercion.” Because Judge Davis felt there was no risk of violence with the use of a firearm, a mandatory five year prison sentence for the 924(c) firearm conviction was also thrown to the wayside.
Bennett says that, “prosecutors often tack on 924(c) firearm charges when they prosecute cases involving crimes of violence and firearms. The statute prohibits using or carrying a firearm during and in relation to a crime of violence. A crime is a crime of violence if there is a substantial risk that a typical perpetrator will use physical force against the victim in the course of committing the crime.”
So in this case, sex trafficking wasn’t considered a crime. Wow. Was Judge Davis not aware that in 2000 Congress passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act that says traffickers “often” subject victims to physical violence? Apparently not. As Bennett points out:
Of women victimized in the U.S. (the vast majority (PDF) of sex trafficking victims are women), 86 percent of the Americans and 53 percent of the non-Americans reported physical abuse by traffickers. That statistic does not include sexual assault, which is itself a form of physical violence. Seventy percent of the American victims and 40 percent of the non-American victims reported that traffickers sexually assaulted them. The researchers cautioned that underreporting means the actual incidence of physical violence, especially against non-American victims, is likely even higher.
Judge Davis looked even more ignorant when he tried to distinguish sex trafficking from burglary. Burglary is considered a crime of violence as “burglary, by its nature, involves a substantial risk that the burglar will use force against a victim in completing the crime.”
Interestingly, a 2015 study (PDF) funded by the Department of Justice found that less than eight percent of burglaries resulted in actual or threatened physical violence. Yet according to Judge Davis, burglary is a crime, and sex trafficking isn’t.
