Congress passed a bill last week explicitly prohibiting federal law enforcement officers from having sex with people in their custody, closing a loophole that previously allowed them to avoid a rape conviction by claiming such an encounter was consensual.

The legal loophole gained widespread attention in 2018, after an 18-year-old woman in New York, Anna Chambers, said that two detectives raped her inside their police van. The detectives, who have since resigned, said she consented. Prosecutors ultimately dropped the sexual assault charges, and the men were sentenced to five years of probation after pleading guilty to bribery and official misconduct.

While laws in all states bar probation officers and prison and jail guards from having sex with people who are incarcerated, most state legal codes don’t include police officers in the language of their sexual abuse provisions, nor specify that sexual encounters between law enforcement agents and people in their custody cannot be consensual, according to a 2018 BuzzFeed News review of state criminal laws. In most of the states that do not explicitly outlaw sex between on-duty cops and detainees, an officer can claim consent and face only a misdemeanor “official misconduct” charge, which carries a maximum one-year sentence.

Source – BuzzFeed.News