Judge-y Midwestern Judge Hates Hookup Culture, Puts Teen on Sex Offender List

A 19 year old Indiana kid was just released from three months in jail and will spend the next 25 years as a registered sex offender because he hooked up with a girl he met on a dating app who told him she was 17 but was really 14.

That's an intense story as it is, but the really weird twist is that the judge and prosecutor seemed to take the biggest issue not with the age difference but with the fact that he used a dating app.

This is what the judge said at a sentencing hearing, according to The New York Times:

"You went online, to use a fisherman's expression, trolling for women, to meet and have sex with. That seems to be part of our culture now. Meet, hook up, have sex, sayonara. Totally inappropriate behavior. There is no excuse for this whatsoever."

Local politicians jumped on the app-dissing, sex-shaming bandwagon, too. State senator Rick Jones told the Times that "society, over several decades, has become looser. People are meeting online, and that creates all sorts of problems. Now, people have all these crazy apps where you can locate people in your vicinity where people want to have a relationship. You should be very careful."

And because this judge and others are super judge-y about hookup culture, 19-year-old Zachary Anderson spent 90 days in jail. He is now barred from using the internet for the next five years, which means he had to drop out of his college program. He also can't own a smartphone (or even hang out with someone who has a smartphone), and, worst of all, he will be a registered sex offender for the first quarter-century of his adult life.

This is all in spite of the fact that he was a first-time offender, turned himself in, pled guilty, oh, and both the girl and the girl's mom testified on Anderson's behalf, asking the court to drop the case because the sex was consensual and the girl lied about her age.

There are a lot of crazy reasons why people end up on the sex offender registry, from teens having sex with other teens to people just taking a piss in public. But getting slapped with a sex offender title for the first quarter century of your adult life because a judge thinks modern hookup culture is "inappropriate?" That's a whole new level of crazy.