there are many gray areas here which must be defined.
Is it the fact that he paid for these pictures that constitutes the crime?
What if he hadn’t paid for them?
What is child pornography?
Are pictures of naked children in a nudist beach considered pornography?
What about peer to peer filesharing software?
These programs interchange files in such volumes that it’s impossible for the user to keep track of what’s in his hardrive
What about copyrighted MP3 files ?
Should a person do time for having these on his hardrive?
My opinion is that this man should be punished only if it was clear that he actively serached for, EXPLICITLY, minor pornography AND paid for it. Child pornography defined as minors performing sexual activities.
It should NOT be a crime to simply LOOK at a picture.
How much does the perceived demand for child porn matter in regards to how much child pornography is produced? Do you think child pornographers are doing this to win popularity points?
See, you presume he is complicit in those acts. To say that is to accept the “market demand” theory of liability in the broadest possible way. To say looking at it or having it on your hard drive is equal to holding the kid down while someone else does the molestation/rape just strains credulity. Even to say paying for it is so equivalent just doesn’t seem realistic.
Would you agree that someone caught with possession of a joint should be less guilty than someone caught growing 500 acres of marijuana and selling it on the open (black) market? What about someone caught selling one joint? Same level of guilt as the guy selling 500 acres?
I concur. It’s an unbelievably broad application of punishing complicity. It’s like punishing a person who has one joint the same as the drug kingpins who actually grew thousands of plants and ran a huge drug operation.
My beef isn’t so much with the fate of this particular offender but with the Arizona Law itself. There are many less culpable people who could get caught up in this.
Well first of all even if he hadn’t paid for it it would be the same crime. Just “looking” is illegal.
Secondly, you don’t know “all” the children are irreperably harmed by being molested. I bet some 17.9 year olds would just love it. They can verbally and physically consent, but not legally consent, thus it is child porn.
Now, even a 4 year old, while quite disgusting, isn’t per se irreperably harmed (assuming no physical damage, of course) just by being molested. I think we believe the “my parents were bad to me which is why i did [bad thing]” line a little too strongly. Everything bad later on in one’s life is caused by something bad that happened to you as a child. Not saying there is never any causation, but to presume it 100% of the time is simply wrong. I’m quite sure there are plenty of perfectly normal, healthy people out there who were molested as children. You just don’t hear about them… because they’re normal and healthy.
That’s another thing about harsh inflexible laws such as these: They allow the judge very little discretion for individual circumstances.
Theoretically, an 18 year old who snapped a few photos of his 17 year old girlfriend (heck, even his lawfully wedded wife) could spend the rest of his life in prison. The judge would be compelled to sentence him to a minimum of 10 years for each photograph.
So, he gets put in prison for the rest of his life for thousands of mouse clicks. So how many mouse clicks is the magic number, anyway?
I’ve had kiddie porn e-mailed to me, and I hate the idea that opening an attachment and looking at it (if only for a few seconds before I deleted it) would be enough to put me in prison for a decade or more, yet there’s no real catch point in the Arizona law (or at least none indicated in the article) that would distinguish my “downloading” of child porn from Berger’s “downloading” of child porn. Such a badly-written law means that if you use the internet (and thus probably have come across child porn at some point, if only in a pop-up ad), the police can get you if they are sufficiently determined. At the very least, I can imagine a scenario where my computer is seized and pored over by experts who find traces of deleted files, and that might be enough (in a sufficient paranoid atmosphere) to get me accused or indicted. Even if eventually acquitted, I’d have to spend serious cash in legal fees to defend myself against the charges of being the equivalent of a child molestor. Certainly my reputation would be tainted.
I find the potential abuses of a law like this far more disturbing than any number of internet pervs.
if it were his wife, she’d be emancipated and thus not a minor, so it wouldn’t be kiddie porn as to him. If some guy broke into his house and stole the picture and sold it on the internet, it would be kiddie porn to him and his customers… I guess.
I would get a kick out of trying the “yeah she’s 15 but she’s married thus emancipated thus not a minor thus it’s not kiddie porn” defense, just to see what happens.
Yes she is. Sexual abuse at an early age causes permanent problems for the rest of the victim’s life.
I think the law, as written, may be over the top but I have no sympathy whatever for a child molester or for anyone who pays to watch the rape of a child. I favor life in prison for child molesters. I favor prison for those who consume child pornography. The problem is that child pornography can be hard to define. We have to admit there’s a difference between simple nudity and actual sexual acts. We also have to recognize that there’s a difference between a toddler and a teenager. I would favor harsher sentences for pornography involving pre-adolescents, but I don’t want to legitimize “teeny” porn either. In the case of the OP, I’d probably recommend about twenty years in stir along with some serious therapy. Upon release from prison I favor chemical castration. I’ve seen chemical castration up close. It works. It makes them grow tits and they don’t have to shave any more but who gives a shit, really?
Oh… no the # of mouse clicks is not the issue. I can launch (in theory) a nuke with a single mouse click. May take me a few mouse clicks to upload top secret gov’t files the net. Hacking into someone’s network and clicking their “delete all” button doesn’t take too many mouse clicks. You get the point. It’s not how easy and trivial it is, it’s how much harm the act causes. Looking at a picture causes no harm. Zero. Buying a picture of kiddie porn causes de minimus harm vis a vis the “market demand theory.”
No, sexual abuse at an early age can cause permanent problems for the rest of the victim’s life. It increases the risk and probability of problems later on in life, many of which can be permanent, others which can be helped with proper therapy.
Smoking doesn’t cause cancer, it increases the probability that you’ll get cancer. If it caused cancer, every single person who took a puff off a cigarette would get cancer. I’m by no means defending molesting a child, but i refuse to believe that every single one (100%) will have problems later in life caused by the molestation. Likewise I refuse to believe that 100% of those cases cannot be helped with proper therapy (psychiatry, psychology, medicine, etc).
As someone who, like Bryan and at least one other Doper I know of, has been actually mailed CP in spam, I would hope that the lawmakers provided a way to distinguish me from the guy who deliberately seeks out thousands of actual child pr0rn pics. Or the person who downloads a Traci Lords porn clip from 1984, whence she was 16 but no sensible human should argue she was a “child”. “Zero Tolerance” laws are most often a bad idea.
Okay. Which way? At what point does the cache directory of spammed illegal images become distinct from the cleverly hidden CP archive?
Then again, I have a large problem with laws such as these in the first place. The way I see it, if the government really wanted to eliminate demand for child pornography, they’d make it legal to trade, but not to sell, and set up some sort of network designed to send child porn to whoever (ick) wanted it. In this way demand for new child porn would go way down.
Well, you’d also have to put in a cut off date (any child porn made after the bill was enacted is henceforth and forever illegal) to discourage any new child pornography from being made. Sounds crazy enough that it just might work. :eek: