Well, I think the sentence is fine. Lock them away. Forever. Frankly, I’d rather have them killed. If you view it, you are a criminal. If it is an accident, you would be horrified and not have 1000 images on your hard drive. These people are predators. They want to have sex with children. I don’t buy the “Well, we’ll give them the porn and they will ‘take care of themselves’ attitiude”. The potential for destroying a child’s life is far too grave. These animals are never “cured” or rehabilitated. That being said…
I would hesitate to enact any minimum sentence regulations. The potential for using this law outside of the bounds it was intended is far too risky. Think of the baby bath pictures, snap one, off you go…
The theory behind prosecution of people who view kiddie porn is that the production of kiddie porn is de facto rape, since kids can’t give informed consent. Possessing kiddie porn is like owning porn of women actually being raped, not pretending to be raped. It’s creating a market for rape, period.
Imagine if there was a market for videos of women in prison having sex with guards.
I don’t know the particulars of this law, but if it doesn’t have any flex that allows for cases where possession of kiddie porn is accidental in nature or otherwise clearly not a product of sexual intent, then it’s not a very good law at all.
I think the most productive approach to the problem of pedophilia would be a serious, well-funded long-term project studying the psychological underpinning of it with an eye toward preventing the development of pedophilic behaviors in the first place and of treating them if they occur in the second.
But everybody’s so caught up in the ‘it’s so awful we must do any horrible thing we can think of to prevent it!’ hysteria that this approach doesn’t even get considered most of the time.
He got a decade for each picture? If NY law followed AZ law, then this guy, a law professor no less, would be looking at 1 million years behind bars. I’m not familiar with the applicable law in New York, but I’m sure he is. From the cited article it looks like he’ll get four years maximum.
The scary thing (well, one of the scary things, at least) is that I took this guy’s copyright law class and even interviewed for an internship with him! As luck would have it, I got a different internship that I parlayed into a post-law school job. Just imagine having a resume featuring an internship with this guy!
Don’t think too poorly of my alma mater (which also had Judge Judy as a graduate :rolleyes: ), as it was also the law school of Supreme Court Justice John Harlan and has the president of the ACLU as a professor.
We’ve discussed the “market demand theory” quite a bit in this thread.
If a crime needs a “theory” behind it to show harm, then it’s quite tenuous and shouldn’t be punishable by anything more than a fine. Actually molesting a child needs no theory to connect the action to a damage.
Evil Captor-“Imagine if there was a market for videos of women in prison having sex with guards.”
I sold out in 3hrs.
jk
I can’t believe all these calls for death for viewing some pictures. Not all these people are child rapers in waiting, the world is not so black and white.
The market theory of culpability is flawed anyway if you ask me. Do you really think that these guys are raping children for the money and fame? These people would be doing it anyway, IMHO.
But, they ARE actually doing something. They are looking at illegal material…which should be punished. Whether or not they offend in person, they are supporting an industry of criminals molesting children.
Someone caught with drugs for their own use is prosecuted for their own offense, they don’t just go after the maker/dealer.
Hmm, that last para doesn’t look too clear, I mean: The rapes that are in child pornography would likely have happened with or without the camera and the subsequent sale of the video.
Unfortunately, thats the basis of a circular argument: it’s bad becuase it’s illegal and illegal because it’s bad. The victim in a molestation case is pretty easy to identify, but giving people punishments identical to child molesters who have not actually molested anyone strikes me as abusive. Further, it’s easy to imagine computer-generated child porn within a few years which involves no minors whatsoever in its production. Does collecting and possessing this material carry similar penalties? If an artist draws a realistic image of a sexualized child (again, with no children involved in the creation of the image), does that count, too?
Tricky ground, and not helped by vague laws. It’s too easy to imagine abuses. Further, imagine an enemy who email/spams me kiddie-porn from a variety of phony addresses. Even if I delete the images, some trace of them may remain on my machine. Then the enemy alerts the cops that I collect kiddie-porn and they seize my computer for analysis. How do I prove that I wasn’t collecting? How do I prove that I didn’t copy the images to disks before deleting them from my hard drive? How long can the cops keep me under surveillance after an accusation has been made? Setting up a frame like this requires relatively minor computer knowledge. Given an e-mail address, I could easily flood someone with kiddie porn (titling my e-mails with “Here’s that image you requested, John!”) even if I never actually meet them. If “John” has only limited comptuer literacy, he may not know how to stop the images from accumulating on his hard drive, which they will even after basic deletion.
I don’t trust ham-fisted law-enforcement officers to make these distinctions, which is why I dont trust laws like these. I think the officers are more likely to seize every computer in sight, file as many charges as possible, and sort it out later. Meanwhile, John’s life is thoroughly fucked. In addition to losing his computer and any useful information it may have contained, he now has to defend himself against emotion-heavy charges. How do you prove that you are not a pervert?
It’s too easy a law to abuse, and that kind of abuse concerns me more than trying to link a person’s collection of images to some theoretical market-driven industry. If they’ve actually abused a child and you can prove it, nail 'em. Otherwise, proceed with extreme caution.
Let’s put it this way: looking at a security video of people robbing a bank while privately fantasizing about robbing a bank doesn’t objectively cause any additional harm to others than has already been done.
While I am actually on the side of those that think the sentence is absurd, this analogy doesn’t hold up. The argument is that looking at child-porn does harm because by the law of supply and demand, it causes children to be exploited to produce the pictures. To use your analogy, one could argue that looking at bank robbery videos should be made illegal if it caused people to go rob banks for the purpose of creating the videos to sell.
What if there were a napster-style p2p picture sharing system, all transfers are free, of course, set up especially for pedophiles? No selling of pictures at all. No market. Just sharing the pics they all already have, free for every pedo out there.
Would that be bad? If we are to believe the RIAA, it would completely destroy the market for kiddie porn and cause the industry to lose a very large amount of money.
Kalt-[referring to child porn free p2p] Would that be bad? If we are to believe the RIAA, it would completely destroy the market for kiddie porn and cause the industry to lose a very large amount of money.
It would be bad from a victim’s viewpoint. If children were abused on video it would be a further abuse to them to know those images were being jacked-off to all over the world. I could see your described system for pure faked up pictures and written material.
I can see the market theory side of the argument. If you pay for the information (pictures) you are encouraging the production.
But… if you start cracking down harshly on people for aquiring and possessing information ,… I can see pandoras box opening.
Very soon… everything goes!
Download an explosives manufacturing FAQ ? BUSTED!
… a passage of Mein Kampf ? BUSTED!
… copyrighted MP3 ? BUSTED!
… Pamela Andersons home Video ? BUSTED!
… a picture of any crime… BUSTED!
I know it’s a crazy idea but…how about…ajem… busting those who commited the *actual *crime?
For such a broad, strong, absolute statement, I’m sure you must have many controlled, impartial studies available that you can cite. Where would I find those?
Or is this just a knee-jerk reaction to something you find personally abhorent?
But the scary thing is the 4th Circuit Court, in U.S. v. Mento, said the opposite. Of course it was overridden by the subsequent Ashcroft case, cited above, but the reasoning of the 4th was that if it looked like child porn, it could be prosecuted as such, even if no human being was ever involved in any way as a photographic model.