North of the Columbia River, teenagers need to beware of a remarkable ruling handed down today by the Washington Supreme Court.
The decision, reported by Ken Armstrong of the The Marshall Project, upheld a lower court conviction of a 17-year-old Spokane County boy who texted a photo of his erect penis to an adult woman.
The court found that Washington laws prohibiting the transmission of images of children "engaged in sexually explicit conduct."
A majority of the court decided that the law applied to selfies: "[T]his prohibition extends to any person who disseminates an image of any minor, even if the minor is disseminating a self-produced image," the majority opinion says.
That ruling cements Washington's criminalization of a common if seemingly misguided practice among teenagers.
In a dissenting opinion, Justice Gordon McCloud called the ruling, which could subject minors to a Class B felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, "absurd."