A invoice criminalizing the sending of so-called revenge porn cleared the Senate Tuesday, a ultimate parting present from the Legislature to outgoing Gov. Charlie Baker who has been calling for lawmakers to behave on the issue for years.
“An act relative to transmitting indecent visual depictions by teens and the unlawful distribution of explicit images,” if the House agrees to a July enactment provision, will now head to the governor for his consideration. It was unclear Tuesday night if he would signal it earlier than he walks out of the State House for the final time on Wednesday. He has lengthy supported the thought, however doesn’t routinely touch upon laws he has not but seen and infrequently rejects payments for technical or authorized causes.
The act, handed in May by the House however stalled within the Senate till the tip of December, will make it unlawful for anybody to distribute visible materials of one other individual’s nude physique with out their consent and when “the distribution causes physical or economic injury to the person depicted in the visual material or causes the person depicted in the visual material to suffer substantial emotional distress, and does so with the intent to harm, harass, intimidate, threaten, coerce or cause substantial emotional distress and with reckless disregard for the depicted person’s lack of consent.”
Those who do ship pictures of one other with out their consent can face penalties as much as a $10,000 wonderful or 2-and-a-half years in jail. Participation within the making of such imagery will not substitute for specific consent, in keeping with the textual content of the legislation.
“For the purposes of this subsection, a person’s consent to the creation of visual material shall not constitute consent to the distribution of the visual material,” the act reads.
The Governor’s signature would make Massachusetts one of many final states to criminalize the sending of so-called revenge porn, leaving solely South Carolina as an outlier.
What emerges from the Legislature this week is alongside the identical strains however not the identical technique as a invoice initially proposed by Baker years in the past. That proposal would have developed a wholly new class of felony offenses to explain revenge porn.
The invoice ready for Baker’s signature will as an alternative be sure that the state’s felony harassment statutes apply to circumstances of sending revenge porn.
Herald wire companies contributed.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”