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Posted on 05/09/2012 1:34:50 PM PDT by little jeremiah
In a controversial decision that is already sparking debate around the country, the New York Court of Appeals ruled on Tuesday that viewing child pornography online is not a crime.
"The purposeful viewing of child pornography on the internet is now legal in New York," Senior Judge Carmen Beauchamp Ciparick wrote in a majority decision for the court.
The decision came after Marist College professor James D. Kent was sentenced to prison in August 2009 after more than 100 images of child pornography were found on his computer's cache.
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(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
They are “progressing” to break down the legal sexual barrior between adults and children. Alot of our elitists (along with the UN) want “consentual” sex with children legal. They want it illegal for parents to interfere!
The gay agenda is centered around “gay” children they target for a reason. It is already named abuse for a parent to interfere in a “gay” child’s sexual expression in Masshole. Grooming children for gay sex and idenity is the way homos reproduce.
I will try my best, but as I am in Virginia once I send my draft off it will be kind of out of my hands. I will have to rely on my cousin to keep me posted.
I think the courts took this case in order to cause the legislature to tighten the language of the law. The man was still convicted of other child porn violations so the reversal did not substantially change the man’s sentencing. The court seems to be advising the state legislature to adopt the federal definition of child porn.
From the opinion:
The federal statute regulating conduct related to child pornography, 18 USC § 2252A, provides a useful contrast. Section2252A was amended in 2008 to provide that any person who either”knowingly possesses, or knowingly accesses with intent to view,any book, magazine, periodical, film, videotape, computer disk,or any other material that contains an image of child pornography” is subject to a fine and imprisonment (see 18 USC2252A § [1] [a] [5], as amended by Pub L 110-358, 122 US Stat4002, 4003 [emphasis added]).
Neither provision of the Penal Law at issue here contains comparable language targeted toward the”pull technology” by which one accesses and views Internet images. The words that are employed — “procures” and”possesses” — would not, in ordinary speech, encompass the act of viewing (see State v Barger, 439 Or 553, 563, 247 P3d 309, 314[2011] [”Looking for something on the Internet is like walking into a museum to look at pictures — the pictures are where the person expected them to be, and he can look at them, but that does not in any sense give him possession of them”]). Here, the “School Backyard” Web page was automatically stored in the cache in allocated space that was accessible to defendant. The People did not demonstrate that defendant knew that the page, or any other, for that matter, had been cached.
While the cached page provided evidence that defendant previously viewed the site, the People presented no evidence that defendant downloaded, saved, printed or otherwise manipulated or controlled the image while it was on his screen. That defendant accessed and displayed the site, without more, is not enough. Thus, the evidence was insufficient to show that defendant knowingly possessed the “School Backyard” Web page, either in the form of the cached file or as an image on his screen. It follows,therefore, that there was not sufficient evidence that defendant procured the “School Backyard” page; defendant did not “get possession of [the page] by particular care or effort” (Keyes, 75NY2d at 348 [internal quotation marks omitted]) as by downloading it. Thus, defendant’s convictions under counts 1 and 142 should be reversed.
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The court may have put it improvidently and even arrogantly, but what this would actually mean is that up to this moment, it HAD ALREADY been legal. It’s just that the stupid statute that so many people thought was supposed to ban it, failed to be clear in a crucial area.
We do not need Calvinball in the courts.
About 8 years ago I tried to talk my wife into allowing me to sell everything.... and use the money to buy a 45’ sailboat to live aboard. Had she given me the okay, we would already be gone.
Our country is being eviscerated while we stand and watch it happen.
“Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again.” ~ Ronald Reagan, from his first inaugural speech as governor of California, January 5, 1967
Ronald Reagan’s warning about losing our freedoms echoes down through a generation of lost momentum and squandered opportunity.
We now have the most ignorant electorate in the history of American elections. I believe we have the most corrupt government, lawyers, judges and media our country has ever seen. I doubt that we can save this country with only our ballots... not anymore, it’s just too late.
So the panic appears to be over virtually nothing? The surfing went afoul of law in other ways, so this is just a redundancy that failed?
My WTF meter just exploded. These idiots in charge really do want to enable morally bankrupt ideals.
It’s like the statute was part of the Constitution?
Final Score: Defendant 2 counts reversed, 132 unchanged.
Also from the opinion:
We agree with the Appellate Division, however, that defendant was properly convicted of promotion and possession of the “Arina” video, and possession of 132 images of child pornography recovered from the unallocated space on his computer.Investigator Friedman’s testimony established that at some point defendant downloaded and/or saved the video and the images,thereby committing them to the allocated space of his computer,prior to deleting them. Thus, viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the People, a rational fact finder could conclude that defendant acquired the video and exercised control over it and the images (see People v Contes, 60 NY2d 620, 621
Very interesting point! I do a lot of digging and have ended up places I had no desire to go. What it’s called when you click on a site and it doesn’t loads and takes you some other place? (stream rotator or something like that?)
Even Barack Obama is aware that some things would be political suicide (e.g. why does he still waffle on gay marriage?), and anyhow this was at worst a technicality of an oversight in one single state’s body of legislation and one which both can and will be fixed (thank you Gabz for your assistance there). The federal level isn’t affected at all.
We oughta compile a comprehensive list listing the things the viewing of online or off line should or should not be a crime.
After everything is said there is one question and only one question....how did the images get on his computer if he didn’t save them?
Thank you for that.
It’s a technicality of how web browsers work. Web browsers generally save off everything that was viewed into a file, although some can be put into a mode where this data only goes into volatile memory and never a file. This is for the convenience of the browser in rendering an image upon the screen. Web browsers usually have default settings where these saved files are kept for a finite time if not forever, for the sake of speed should the associated web page be visited in the future. (The local copy is rendered, rather than a freshly downloaded copy.) The browser does not know from porn. It could be the Vatican museum for all it knows.
misread this as “Marxist college professor” and thought, wow, that doesn’t narrow it down at all ...but as I read on, it made sense.
Kiddie Porn laws are Federal. The New York Court is out of its jurisdiction.
I think you’re misunderstanding the ruling LJ. All it states is that images on the cache alone are not proof of intent. In this case, it had virtually no effect on the man’s sentencing as there was plenty of other proof that he had knowingly downloaded child porn.
And yes, it is incredibly easy to see things you don’t want to see on the internet. I called the FBI (who I believe blew me off) over a decade ago when I saw such images on an AOL message board. Those images were no doubt in my cache, so was I guilty of a crime?
Just fyi, I know of at least once instance where reading FR has resulted in users unwittingly being exposed to porn they did not wish to see. It was some website’s juvenile response to an innocent FRreeper hot linking images, and the mods quickly removed it, but still, that was an image that wound up the cache.
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