Not a lawyer, just a dumbfuck, but also not so sure about this interpretation.
Its only illegal if you take it off then proceed to fuck the keyholder without consent.
Otherwise its like taking the condom off and walking out of the room, which I have to imagine is legal.
taking the condom off and walking out of the room
ah yes, like the one time I ragequit sex
This is not uncommon, that laws are written not considering all nuances, so a generally innocent thing is made illegal.
The primary protection for this is prosecutorial discretion which is to say the DA can choose not to take such cases. Also the police have to be willing to enforce and book instances (they’re usually happy to) and gubernatorial positions like the mayor or governor can command law enforcement not to enforce a specific law (which sometimes they’ll obey).
This often comes up in undocumented immigrant cases in which there are communities with a lot of overstayed visas, or while cannibis was in a grey zone of being locally accepted while nationally scheduled.
It’s also why tweens weren’t gathered up for making a Facebook account while under thirteen years, even though that violated the CFAA, a federal crime punishable by up to 25 years. We don’t really want to put little girls in federal prison.
This is a problem when some official would like you to disappear into the penal system, say because he covets your land or your livestock or your spouse. Then your chastity cage may become a liability.
Prosecutorial discretion is a big problem really. It’s what allows laws to be applied unequally, why black people are prosecuted way more than white people, and, as you mention, provides justification to jail anyone at any time because you ARE violating some law every day, almost certainly.
If prosecutorial discretion did not exist, if agents of the law were required to prosecute all crimes to the fullest extent of the law, it would require the entire legal system to be restructured in a more precise way, and would have far less room for racial, sexual, and class discrimination as well as far less capacity to be weaponized against enemies of those in power.
Well that’d require (among other things) a simplified set of laws, clear structure, with the goal of adhering to the spirit, not the letter of the law. The result can be expected to be faster trials, reduced lawyer workloads, and all the reduction in costs that come with that.
Pssh, who wants that?
I’d go the other way, adhering very strictly to the letter of the law without the tiniest bit of wiggle room or interpretation of anything as nebulous as the ‘spirit’ of the law.
Trouble being that natural languages that people use to converse are ill suited for that level of precision and detail. I’ve thought that perhaps a constructed language, something between a language and programming code may be a better way to write laws.
