PA Court - Simply Viewing Child Porn Is A Crime

HARRISBURG - Pennsylvania's highest court has ruled that merely viewing child pornography on the Internet is a crime and that prosecutors do not necessarily have to prove a defendant intentionally downloaded the material.

The Supreme Court yesterday upheld the 2005 Delaware County conviction of Anthony Diodoro on 30 counts of sexual abuse of children and one count of criminal use of a communications facility.

Diodoro's computer automatically saved child-pornography images to the hard drive.

The court's opinion says the law "should not and cannot be read to allow intentional and purposeful viewing of child pornography on the Internet without consequence."

Diodoro's lawyer Mark Much had no immediate comment, and a phone message left at the Delaware County Prosecutor's Office late yesterday wasn't immediately returned.

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/lo...s_a_crime.html

This is a crazy ruling IMHO.

What is to stop someone going to a website they think is legitimate and seeing child porn, closing their browser, reporting the CP to the authorities, then still getting arrested and charged?

Or worse yet, someone mailing another person CP then reporting them just to get them arrested?

I really wish some of these judges would actually use common sense with their rulings sometimes, not all of the time, just a really small percentage of the time would be nice.

Regards,

Lee

I agree with the intention behind this, which is aimed at nailing people viewing CP, but I also agree that there are a ton of issues, such as shady sites with popups that could put CP images in your browser cache, or viruses, or porn spam, or other things where someone could, totally innocently, end up with CP on their machine.

It's a tough call. I would guess that in part the ruling (and the law underlying it) is to prevent pedophiles from coming up with bogus excuses to get off the hook, but I don't think that sacrificing the liberties of innocent people is worth it.

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Originally Posted by gaybucks_chip

It's a tough call. I would guess that in part the ruling (and the law underlying it) is to prevent pedophiles from coming up with bogus excuses to get off the hook, but I don't think that sacrificing the liberties of innocent people is worth it.

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I could not agree more.

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Originally Posted by Benjamin Franklin

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"

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