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Comment by DominikR | Hacker News Reader

From the Wikipedia article on Pussy Riot:

"Pussy Riot members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Yekaterina Samutsevich participated in some Voina performances. Tolokonnikova was part of a performance in which a number of couples were filmed having sex in the Biology Museum in Moscow in 2008."

You can easily find footage of them participating in this orgy. How would you handle such "protesters" that constantly show this kind of behaviour for many years? I guess they would be imprisoned in the US as well.

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I would not "handle" them in any way. Why should I "handle" them? There are a lot of people having sex, some of them film that, so what? Who cares about it and how it is related to anything?

If you think people that have sex or film it (provided, of course, we're talking about consenting adults) are imprisoned in the US, you obviously do not know much about US. In the US, to be imprisoned, one has to actually commit a crime and be judged and sentenced, and this happens in independent court which does not jump when the government says "jump!". So please do not guess, because your guess is wrong.

So it is legal to have a public sex orgy in a museum in the US? I honestly didn't know that.

It is not legal, but perpetrators of such acts would be unlikely to receive 3 years in jail.

For example, a NY DJ was caught having public gay sex. He was arrested and sentenced to 12 sessions of counseling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_Cee

Fines and short jail sentences are the typical result of such incidents.

http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-06-16/news/32272544_1_t...

In the UK indecent exposure 'with the intent to shock' is punishable up to 2 years imprisonment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indecent_exposure

Nor did Pussy Riot receive 3 years in jail for that.

This was something they did 4 years ago, and since then they repeatedly broke the law. (other examples: "Samutsevich took part in actions which involved releasing live cockroaches in a court room and kissing policewomen in the Moscow metro and on the streets (which in some cases was seen as attempted assault)")

The sentence for the DJ was perfectly resonable after this misstep, and I hope he didn't have trouble with the police any more after counseling. But imagine what the sentence would look like for him after repeatedly showing such behaviour.

Edit: Actually he did have sex in his car .. doesn't even look like if it was his intent to get caught. Thats a whole different thing and not comparable to having such a performance in a museum in front of 20 news reporters.

US courts would deny every witness and every question from the defense in the trial for it. A large portion of the outrage is not from the fact that a law was punished, it was the show-trial nature of the proceeds.

They weren't charged for other incidents.

Yes, that is true. What I wanted to give you with my comment is an insight that this harsh sentence didn't come unexpectedly out of the blue.

Those girls have a long history of such "actions" and what in most civilized countries happens is that you first get fined, then you are maybe arrested and set free on probation, and if you still refuse to conform to a socially (and legally) more acceptable behaviour, you eventually end up in jail.

The same goes for Kasparov. He's been arrested so many times for willfully committing minor offenses, that if he is found to be guilty of biting that officer he'll probably get a sentence near the maximum of 5 years in prison.

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