A mother nursing her child is not kiddie porn

[lee]

This story describes how a family has been torn apart because the parents took a picture of the mother breastfeeding and had it developed at a local store. From the cited article:

“I think the police department and the DA’s office select people to prosecute who have the least ability to defend themselves,” says Chatham, who says he took the case on principle. “If these pictures were on their way back to some big home in Highland Park, they would have turned around and left. They were going after easy marks.”

How can a picture of a child breastfeeding, an act that is allowed in public most places and should be allowed in public everyplace safe for a mother and child to be, be child porn?

[lander2k2]

This is sickness, plain and simple. Law enforcement that would tear apart a family over a picture of a mother breast-feeding has gone off the deep end. I don’t know if this law enforcement agency is simply trying too hard to find cases to prosecute so as to justify their budget or they are just warped. IMHO, the fact that they see a photo of a mother breast feeding as sexual says more about the mentality of the cops and the prosecution than it does about the defendant.

Welcome to America, ma’am. Hope you appreciate the freedoms afforded you.

[mhendo]

Jesus H. Christ.

I’m not quite sure why you put this in GD, because there seems almost nothing to debate. Those cops and other state officials are a bunch of heartless morons.

When i think of the pictures and home movies that my mother took of my sister and me when we were toddlers, i give thanks that there were no such jackbooted attitudes in Australia in 1973.

Kudos to the lawyers for helping the Mercado family.

[Already_in_Use]

Hell, we sent a picture of a nursing mother into space on Voyager 1 and 2.

[lee]

Law enforcement is not the only barrier to the reuniting of the families from what I read. Some mental health professional has decided they need to jump through more hoops to get the kids back.

[Duck_Duck_Goose]

Well, first of all, it’s not just “a picture”, it was a whole series of similar pictures, so I can see why the photo lab called the cops.

Others captured their 1-year-old son Rodrigo, and 4-year-old Pablizio, from Mercado’s earlier marriage, playing in a neighborhood park. Using the camera’s timer, they also took three snapshots of themselves, naked in their bed. They arranged their bodies in ways that showed less flesh than most freeway billboards.

A half-dozen others recorded the kids at bath time. Fernandez took several photos of the boys “playing around,” naked and innocent, with the oldest flashing a big smile. Mercado, who says she often bathed with the kids, is in several of the shots unclothed from the waist up, holding her arm modestly across her bare chest.

And second, it’s not the first time “naked kids” family photos have triggered an investigation.

Understanding Civil Liberties

The images at the center of the exhibit are apparently two photographs in a series by photographer Tierney Gearon of her own children at play. Emily and Michael, aged six and four, are captured partially or completely naked, with the boy pissing in the snow in one shot.

< snip >

Last year, an amateur photographer in Ohio, Cynthia Stewart, found herself in the same boat after she took pictures of her eight-year-old daughter in the bathtub. Photo lab employees, under official pressure to sniff-out such smut, turned Stewart’s film over to the local fuzz.

As the about.com link mentions, the laws regarding when photo processors are supposed to blow the whistle on potential porn photos are murky, so sometimes they prefer to err on the side of caution.

[lee]

I am not faulting the photo processing place, as much as the law enforcement officers and CPS. Both are supposed to use judgment and clearly did not.

[cheddarsnax]

“actual lewd exhibition of…a portion of the female breast below the top of the areola, and the said defendant did and then employ, authorize and induce Rodrigo Fernandez, a child younger than 18 years of age, to engage in said sexual conduct and sexual performance”

Breast feeding is sexual performance? Why aren’t my parents in jail?

[istara]

Of ALL the shots, the breastfeeding one is the LEAST suspicious, MOST innocent.

THAT’S WHAT THEY’RE FOR!!!

Oh GOD I wish this was in the Pit. How sick is our society getting?

Frankly, we should be promoting breast feeding shots, and reclaiming breast for women and infants, to whom they fucking belong.

[Robb]

We can debate this:

“I think the police department and the DA’s office select people to prosecute who have the least ability to defend themselves,” says Chatham, who says he took the case on principle. “If these pictures were on their way back to some big home in Highland Park, they would have turned around and left. They were going after easy marks.”

Andy is wrong about this. People from Highland Park get prosecuted for sex crimes and they aren’t easy marks - they high very good, expensive lawyers.

[Bricker]

As I understand it, it was NOT breastfeeding – the child was no longer breastfeeding, but the parents wanted to “stage” the breastfeeding scene for the picture.

Fernandez and Mercado say they took it–although the child had ceased breast-feeding–to memorialize that stage of their baby’s development.

“We wanted to see if he would take it, and he did,” says Mercado, explaining through an interpreter that it was a spur-of-the moment notion to which they gave little thought. “Johnny never saw the child breast-feeding, so this was for memories. For us.”

[Avalonian]

Jesus fucking Christ on a fucking pogo stick.

Hey, I know this isn’t the Pit, but this is just out-and-out sick. Law enforcement, which is supposed to be there to protect people, is instead overstepping its bounds and causing them massive trouble and pain where none existed.

With all due respect DDG, but if the developing lab called the cops for those photos, they need to be looked at closely. Their standards are far too low. I have a number of similar pictures taken with my kids when they were young – this makes me (and/or my wife) a child pornographer in their eyes? I guess they never had naked pictures taken of them when they were kids?

However, the real problem is not the photo lab – it’s the fucking cops. I have respect for many law officers, but apparently this proves my point that sticking a fucking badge on your chest doesn’t automatically make you smarter, give you better judgment, or make you any less of an ass than you normally are. Some cops are just idiots or assholes – or both. Apparently, the density of those in Richardson, Texas is higher than most.

A couple real gems:

**In the months since, one of the couple’s most onerous problems has been resolved. In late March, a week after the Dallas Observer asked District Attorney Bill Hill about the case, he ordered the criminal charges against both parents dropped. “It has some gray areas to it, but it doesn’t rise to the level of a crime,” Hill said. He said justice comes from more than isolating facts and interpreting them in a way to make them narrowly fit into a criminal statute. **

Oh, nice… how big of the DA. He should issue a damn apology on the part of his entire office for taking this as far as it went. This family is owed an apology, and more than that.

Still, at press time, child welfare authorities continue to maintain control of the boys, even though a lawyer appointed to represent them says he believes they should go home. In its latest legal filing, the state said it would not consent to releasing the boys until the couple jumps through more hoops, including a lie-detector test they must take at their own expense.

Ah, yes… let’s not forget child welfare’s part in all of this. It seems that, once children have been separated from their parents, child welfare sees its job as trying as hard as possible to keep them apart. Damn these people to hell for prolonging the pain of those children, and this family.

I’m absolutely livid at this.

[Kallisti]

Just boyfriend? If they have a son together why aren’t they married?

[KellyM]

Because they chose not to be? I don’t see how that is relevant in any way.

[RTFirefly]

Here’s the part that burns me (one of 'em, anyway):

Hill did not fault the work of his assistants who presented the case to the grand jury, or the police who now are reportedly perturbed that their case was dumped. The charges and the couple’s arrests were no doubt “traumatic,” he says, “but in this instance the system worked.”

Don’t you just love those cases where “the system worked” only after the press got wind of them?

The DA’s office was using the law to bully these folks, then once the story hit the papers, they all of a sudden woke up, slapped their foreheads, and said, “My gosh, people might think we’re bullies!”

Since this isn’t the Pit, I can’t give my forthright opinion of those alleged human beings.

But the story continues:

Not if you are Rodrigo and Pablizio, who have not been returned to their mother yet.

The children were taken from their parents on November 13. :mad:

In their psychological exams, which they made available for this report, the only problems the experts could discern in interviews with the parents were those heaped on them by CPS and the police. And those, too, seemed to be held against them in the less-than-empirical world of psychoanalysis.

“When asked about problems occurring in his life currently, Mr. Fernandez states that the children have been removed, there is little money for lawyers, and it’s all a big injustice,” wrote Robert Antonetti, a Dallas psychologist who interviewed the couple earlier this year. “He reported currently feeling anxious, angry at the injustice he is enduring and fearful of what may happen. When asked about coping with stress he said he’s been praying a lot.”

In his summary and recommendations, Antonetti mentions no evidence of sexual deviancy in either parent. Instead, he concludes that Fernandez “feels very vulnerable to criticism and judgment.”

The accusation that you’re a sexual deviant who victimizes his own children might tend to do that.

The psychologist divines from his own psychological tests–and no material evidence whatsoever–that Fernandez appeared to be so “anxious to please” that he might be hiding something. “The profile suggests the probability that he attempted to present himself in an improbably favorable light,” Antonetti concludes. Hence, the state-hired Antonetti recommended Fernandez be made to take a polygraph test before getting his son back. He recommended Mercado should be hooked up to one, too. He further recommended both should undergo parenting classes, individual counseling and couples counseling.

Two weeks ago, with a deadline looming for the state either to return the children or go back to court and ask to remove them permanently, Dallas Assistant District Attorney April Carter asked the judge in the case to require the parents to take the tests and attend the counseling before anyone goes home. “There are concerns we need to address,” says Carter, who is representing CPS in family court. She says the store clerk, the Richardson police, the grand jury and others took issue with the photos and without further proof, “it’s not clear whether this was sexual or cultural.” She says she believes lie-detector tests would put that question to rest.

:mad:

[Mtgman]

That’s true. They did stage the breasfeeding scene. Here’s a little more backstory(summarized from the article which I was going to start a thread on if no one else had).

Johnny Fernandez and Jacqueline Mercado were a couple in Peru. Ms. Mercado’s first marriage had ended and she and Mr. Fernandez had become involved. They had a child together who was, at the time of the photo, approximately one year old. Not long after the baby was born, Mr. Fernandez immigrated to the US and began working to bring the rest of his family here. He accomplished it and the baby, the son from the first marriage and Jacqueline came to join him in Richardson, TX. The baby had nursed and weaned during the period the couple was seperated. The father had not been present for most of the baby’s life so far and wanted a momento of some of what he missed. So they offered the baby the breast(even though he was technically weaned) and snapped a photo. Since even weaned babies will often nurse if offered, the baby took them up on it. The father, newly re-united with his family after a year-long seperation, snapped a picture to commemorate the event that he had not been around to personally see earlier in the baby’s life.

It should also be noted that the felony charges have been dropped and the case dismissed. The problem the family is still facing is that the state took their children from them and placed them in foster care. An compromise was reached which allowed the children to come into the custody of Jacqueline’s first husband(who has also immigrated and lives in the Dallas area) and the couple has visitation rights, but the children have not been turned back over to the couple. A big part of the state’s case of them as unfit parents hinges on them being under indictment for felony child pornography at the time the children were first taken.

This is a classic case of a person being accused of a crime which, although the charges were deemed meritless and the case dismissed, the “stigma” remains and causes harm to the family. It is flat out wrong, and I’m glad the case is starting to get some attention. Kudos to the lawyers representing this immigrant family.

Enjoy,
Steven

[Mtgman]

Oy! That’s what I get for multitasking. Sorry for the tortured language in that previous post. It should also be noted that one of the “pornographic” features of the snapshot was that the boy was touching himself. Ms. Mercado explained that he had a rash and produced a prescription ointment for itching that their doctor had prescribed for the baby. A very low-resolution copy of the photo in question can be seen on page two or three(don’t remember which) of the article.

As far as I am concerned this whole thing was a miscarriage of justice and for it to have gone on for five months and STILL there is a chance they will be deemed “unfit parents” and NEVER get their children back over this just really makes me mad. A fund has been set up for the family to cover their legal expenses and to show support. Their lawyer is handling it. It was just set up after this story broke and I can get the address if anyone is interested. Some of the mothers in our local parent’s group are considering a “nurse-in” in front of the Richardson courthouse. Probably with plenty of photos to commemorate the events.

Enjoy,
Steven

[Splanky]

I don’t want to stereotype, but the first thing I thought of when I saw this was, “This must be in Texas”.

Lo and behold it is. It’s a stupid thing to say in this debate, but we’ve seen things almost this stupid and sexually repressive come out of texas (The anti-sodomy laws for example).

Don’t flame me, I just found it ironic.

[Bricker]

This case is a good example of how the grand jury system, which theoretically exists to place the citizenry between the overwhelming powers of the prosecutor and an accused, doesn’t always work in an ideal manner.

To get an indictment, prosecutors had to convince the grand jurors that a crime had been committed. The grand jury looked at these pictures and agreed.

Why did this happen?

In most cases, the supposedly independent grand jury is under the prosecutor’s control. A well-known, if wry, commentary on the situation: “The grand jury would indict a ham sandwich for the murder of Abraham Lincoln if the prosecutor asked them to.” Witnesses are not permitted to have their lawyers present, and the prosecutor can present a very one-sided cases to the grand jury.

I’m not sure there’s a good answer to this problem – but it can be a problem.

[Mtgman]

*Originally posted by Bricker *
**As I understand it, it was NOT breastfeeding – the child was no longer breastfeeding, but the parents wanted to “stage” the breastfeeding scene for the picture. **

Neither the store clerk, nor the police knew that fact before the charges were pressed! Sorry I have taken this a little personally.
Melissa
who is too upset to change the user ids and log in as herself:mad: