A former Elementary School principal was arrested on child pornography charges in Florida. It seems what he was basically doing was photoshopping the faces of children on adult nude bodies. The article doesn’t specify that the bodies are of adults, but it seems that the charges are based on the age of the faces and not the bodies.
Should this really be illegal? Should it be labeled “child porn”? Are there any dopers out there that want tax dollars being used to prosecute someone for cutting out pictures of the Gerber baby and pasting them onto a picture of a naked, adult body?
Child pornography isn’t illegal because it’s weird or ‘icky’ or morally wrong. It’s a crime because it causes harm to children. In this case, no children were actually being photographed in any sexual way, so if you look at it outright, no children were harmed.
However, the faces are still of real children. If, by some (probably nearly impossible) chance the children in question were to be made aware that their faces were being used for such purposes, that may cause emotional damage.
I don’t think it’s a valid criminal matter (and wouldn’t want to see my tax dollars spent on prosecuting the accused), but the parents of the children would certainly have a civil case.
I agree. And at that point it’s just a question of appropriating someone else’s image without permission and no more than that.
This country – and much of the world, consequently – has lost it’s frickin’ mind when it comes to child porn and terrorism. The two boogeymen of today. :rolleyes:
I agree; it’s a tough one. The emotional damage thing is tough too. Is emotional damage ever a crime? Is this sort of emotional damage good grounds for a civil case if it weren’t a crime in the eyes of the law? Lets say someone pastes the pictures of his neighbors adult faces on nude bodies for his own personal use. Surely if his briefcase were seized and his acts were made public, as were whose faces he used, those neighbors would probably suffer some amount of emotional damage. But so what? Him calling a neighbor a fat ass may cause her emotional damage also, but I wouldn’t want her to be able to sue him because of it.
That’s the thing. It IS always a media sensation because of this (it being icky and immoral, that is). Its ten times worse than being accused of murder.
I thought The Supreme Court already ruled that criminalizing ‘virtual kiddie porn’ (which this clearly is) was unconstitutional? That pervo-principal can clearly be prosecuted for a number of crimes that will get him fired and unable to ever work around kids again. And if that’s all he’s done (the Photoshop thing) then that’s kinda enough. He shouldn’t go to prison (yet).
That was essentially the Supreme Court’s argument for retaining this statute when the rest of the 1996 Child Protection Act (the so-called “Virtual Porn” law) was overturned.
Which begs the question…how can a pedophile get aroused by a naked ADULT body? That makes no sense!
The story says the photos were found in his briefcase and on his home computer. It gives no indication that the photos had been found anywhere else.
If he didn’t share these photos with anyone else, then AFAIAC, (a) it was nobody’s business but his own, and (b) the investigation, not his actions, will have been the source of any emotional harm to the ‘victims.’
Gotta wonder what the nature was of the complaints the police received.
And in any event, I think that even if he did show those pix to anyone else, the nature of the crime is too inconsequential for this attitude:
That’s certainly the sort of thing that requires a response by the school district, and perhaps the law. But not being a legal eagle, I don’t see how a search of his papers is justified by such claims: either he was being overly friendly with his elementary school students, in which case he gets his ass fired (and prosecuted, if it went that far), or not. But his personal papers aren’t going to tell you that, unless he molested said students and kept pictures of it. Which he apparently didn’t.
Whatever the truth of his behavior with the children, the photos aren’t evidence in that case, and may not be evidence in any case. But they’ve ruined this guy’s life in the newspapers in the meantime.
If it turns out he’s behaved sufficiently inappropriately with the kids in his school (or elsewhere), they’re free to ruin his life over that. But right now it looks like “we had a subpoena to investigate X, and we found something tangentially related that will humiliate him for life, so we shared it with the media, even though it may not be illegal, and probably isn’t even evidence in our original case.”
Stelnack sounds like a guy you wouldn’t want to trust around your kids, but that doesn’t mean the authorities should ruin his life before they’ve got a case to justify it.
They got a warrent to search his briefcase based on his “level of affection” towards students? Or do they not need a warrent to search his briefcase if they’re in his office?
Actually, what was knocked down specifically was images created without the use of the likeness of any actual minor, meaning either completely virtual sims, cartoons, or youthful adult performers pretending to be minors.
However, as the law stands now, after it was amended to try and hew to the ruling w/o giving up completely, it is still illegal to do cutting-and-pasting or painting or morphing any likeness of an actual minor onto a sexually explicit or lewd image; and so is creating sim/virtual porn if (a) the image is “indistinguishable” to an observer from a real child, AND (b)it fulfills the legal definition for obscenity. These are outlawed not as CP but as distinct offenses, but sloppy reporting insists on calling it that…
IANAL, but if the briefcase is his, I’d think they’d need a warrant to go rummaging inside it. Even if it’s been provided to him by the school district as part of his job, my non-legal WAG would be that he’d have a reasonable expectation that the contents would be regarded as private.
It seems to me that this is the sort of thing that we should be encouraging pedophiles to do. This way they satisfy their lust while not involving children in any real way.
Part of the rationale given for the banning of the possession of child porn, while the banning of the possession of pictures of other criminal acts is not, in and of itself, illegal, is that child porn is made because a market exists for it. The same rationale is extended to the ban of this kind of material.
I’m not defending the reasoning there, but that is what is put forward.
There are those who believe that pornography is a “safe outlet” for sexual deviants. There are those who believe that pornography “encourages” the deviant person and that inevitably pornography will not suffice and actual acts with actual people will follow.
I tend to lean toward the first belief, but have no proof either way. There was a bit of a cause celebre in Canada some time ago when the public was told that criminals imprisoned for crimes, up to and including rape and murder, were “allowed” to possess porn in prison. (Not child porn, as far as I know.) It would be nice, I guess, if imprisoning a man caused his sexual urges to vanish, wouldn’t it?
The man in question in this thread may be a pedophile, but that’s beside the point now. Did he commit a crime by pasting a child’s face on an adult body? I guess so. But what if he painted these pictures? Wrote descriptions?
IANAL but as I understood the current state of affairs, if he painted them he could be in trouble with the Law if the painting were deemed legally obscene and the child-model for the face were identifiable; or if there being no identifiable child-model he distributed obscene material. I don’t think he’d be in trouble for a piece of written fiction, with, again, the caveat about fulfilling the Miller test for legal obscenity (Doper Lawyers, would it be fair to say that in the practice, the idea of trying written fiction for obscenity has been abandoned in the US?).
That makes no sense!