John Grisham says child porn sentences too harsh

cbi1972 · Oct 22, 2014

TIDE-HSV said:
I think you'd better read the Alabama statute again and more carefully this time:

Note the bolded language. Four images make one a prima facie distributor. There is a school teacher from Limestone County presently doing time in an Alabama who had a dozen or so pix which the prosecution convinced the jury involved underage participants, which put him over the limit. BTW, all of the images had been deleted and were recovered by computer experts. So, in the end, it amounts to strict liability. It's Catch 22. Not only will he never be a principal again, he'll never teach school again. The idea that most prosecutions occur under the federal statute is just wrong. There is active prosecution on a continuing basis in Alabama. The only ones which really come up under the federal statute are guys involved in rings of file-swapping groups. The Alabama cases seem to be mostly from disgruntled ex-spouses or someone else who has a grudge against the defendant. Again, I'll state that the present AL statute is flawed and the registration statute needs to be more nuanced instead of black or white...

The "copies" language doesn't make much sense in a digital world.

Neither does "depiction" for that matter.

TIDE-HSV · Oct 22, 2014

cbi1972 said:
The "copies" language doesn't make much sense in a digital world.

Neither does "depiction" for that matter.

I believe that "copies" really means more than one original image. "Depiction" is just old fashioned talk for "image."

cbi1972 · Oct 22, 2014

TIDE-HSV said:
I believe that "copies" really means more than one original image. "Depiction" is just old fashioned talk for "image."

It sounded to me like the statute was written with physical media in mind, with possession of multiple identical copies of the same depiction counting as evidence to distribute.

Possession of multiple digital copies is reasonable for backup purposes with no actual intent to distribute, and distribution can be done perfectly well with possession of only one digital copy.

And an image file doesn't become an actual image until it is displayed, so it is unclear what qualifies as a depiction in this context just from the words.

It requires significant interpretation to apply this law to pictures in digital form.

TIDE-HSV · Oct 22, 2014

cbi1972 said:
It sounded to me like the statute was written with physical media in mind, with possession of multiple identical copies of the same depiction counting as evidence to distribute.

Possession of multiple digital copies is reasonable for backup purposes with no actual intent to distribute, and distribution can be done perfectly well with possession of only one digital copy.

And an image file doesn't become an actual image until it is displayed, so it is unclear what qualifies as a depiction in this context just from the words.

It requires significant interpretation to apply this law to pictures in digital form.

Don't know how they're interpreting it, but on the local news of the Tennessee Valley, there have been two new prosecutions of possession of child porn with intent to distribute (more than three images) announced - yesterday in Madison County and today in Limestone County. I'm not sure where Boston gets the idea that all the prosecutions are happening on the federal level, but it's simply incorrect...

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John Grisham says child porn sentences too harsh

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