Well, the entire establishment of photojournalism relies upon the concept of others viewing images of acts that some might find objectionable and are often illegal and abhorrent. Using laws to go against legitimate evils in this world is fine, but when those laws are sufficiently generalized they become a liability for society. After all, the majority of oppression done in Soviet Union, for example, was justified using fairly normal, but overly general laws that most reasonable people supported in principle. Why shouldn’t shizophrenics get treated for free? This might be a pretty fine hair to split, but it’s the distinction that punishes the truly guilty while allowing this picture of a naked, terrified, injured child to remain free of censorship.
I don’t think it is. I gather that there is quite a bit of CP floating around on various filesharing networks. If downloading music and movies is wrong because it is “stealing” profits from the people who make it, how is downloading CP different? Do the heinous abusers who create films and photos of children being violated have some magical device that makes them more able to profit from their “product” than the hardworking musicians and filmmakers whose works are pirated?
I know it’s an unpopular view, but imo, just because someone looks at CP doesn’t mean they want to abuse a child. I have friends who are into lolicon and toddlerkon who wouldn’t dream of grooming or molesting an actual child - they have confessed to me that they when they contemplate the reality, they find it messy, disgusting and generally undesireable.
There are lots of sexual fantasies people have, that they don’t want to truly act on, like rape or incest or bestiality. Nancy Friday’s book My Secret Garden has examples of women fantasizing about all of those things, and the majority of them never act on them (there were one or two women who actually engaged in bestiality and incest, out of a few dozen who confessed to fantasies about those things). I don’t see how pedophilia is different.
In conclusion, from what we know, this guy is mostly-normal, he was exploring some more shadowy recess of the human psyche and he got caught. He didn’t have gigs and gigs of the stuff, and there is apparently no reason to think he actually hurt anyone. I presume that if the police HAD more on him, they would have slapped him with more charges.
I wouldn’t feel bad for not tarring and feathering him.
I really don’t think the guy mentioned in the OP was researching or collecting images of social injustice, or was doing anything else but whacking off to kiddie porn.
Re 1010011010’s point, I don’t have an objection to frolicking teens videotaping themselves, as long as everyone’s aware and consenting of it. I hope no one does. (Except maybe their parents.) They should keep the video to themselves, of course.
ETA: If you’re watching pirated kiddie porn, you’re not just a pedophile, you’re a thief. 
That’s my last word in this thread.
Who knows what he was doing with it? According to the OP he had “thousands” of other images that did not meet the definition of child porn. It was probably still weird, but not necessarily dangerous or “abetting child rape”.
Malicious release following break-ups, teenage exhibitionism, et al. Maybe they should, but they don’t.
Porn involving sexually mature children (I.E. 17 year olds) would not appeal to a pedophile. And copyright infringement is not theft.
That’s a telling thought. My high school’s theatre department had, shall we say, lax personal boundaries and little-to-no sense of modesty, and as such there are many pictures taken as jokes that might have been illegal. Weird.
Yeah, I’ve got to figure out how the hell I’m going to cover this one.
Point of clarification. The ‘thousands of pictures’ on his hard drive were all, according to the sheriff’s office, child porn. I have no information concerning what else might be there.
The police chose to display 176 of them to the prosecutors office. He plea bargained down to just the two and take a pandering conviction.
As for how it went down? A police officer in California was arrested for having child pornography and this guys email was on his system. They’d been swapping pictures.
Speaking as a journalist I’d love to have more information concerning who else was on this guys email. That would interest me greatly.
And some have ladles. 
Oh, well that’s different then.
If it came down to it, I wonder if they would treat someone who ACTUALLY DID only have two illegal pictures on their HD, differently than someone with thousands?
Back around '92 I had a run-in with the “Unibomber” Ted Kaczynski.
I’d cover it in light of the larger investigation, personally. Just give the local resident involvement a two cent line at the end. Kiddie porn is powerful stuff, so even an oblique connection will be enough for folks to get the “Hey, watch your kids.” message without going too much into “ZOMG! PEDOPHILE! BURN HIM!” territory.
If it’s highly localized operation, you could ask him if he wants to submit something… he might be willing to confess more than you’d feel comfortable exposing about him as a third party. OTOH, it could be some seriously weird apologetics.