February 12, 2007
Crime and Punishment Department
Child Porn or Not Child Porn
Now that I've ruined any chances of selling ads by advocating drug smuggling and blogging about Nazi iconography, I might as well round it off by defending a bit of child pornography.
Pop Quiz: If you make a video of an adult having sex with an under-age teenager, you're guilty of creating child pornography. If you make a video of two teenagers, ages 16 and 17, who are close enough in age to have legal sex with each other, you are still guilty, this time of exploiting two children to create pornography, because they are both too young to appear in a sexually explicit image. Okay, now what happens if the two teenagers make a video of themselves having sex? Are they guilty of exploiting themselves to make child pornography?
Answer: Yes, if they're in Florida:
On March 25, 2004, Amber and Jeremy took digital photos of themselves naked and engaged in unspecified "sexual behavior." The two sent the photos from a computer at Amber's house to Jeremy's personal e-mail address. Neither teen showed the photographs to anyone else.
Court records don't say exactly what happened next--perhaps the parents wanted to end the relationship and raised the alarm--but somehow Florida police learned about the photos.
Amber and Jeremy were arrested. Each was charged with producing, directing or promoting a photograph featuring the sexual conduct of a child. Based on the contents of his e-mail account, Jeremy was charged with an extra count of possession of child pornography.
Understand that sex between these two teenagers was legal, because even though they're under 18, they're close enough in age to fall under Florida's Romeo-and-Juliet rules.
At least one of the teens appealed under the privacy guarantees of the Florida Constitution, but that appeal was rejected. The opinion was written by Judge James Wolf, a former prosecutor. Here's an excerpt:
Appellant was simply too young to make an intelligent decision about engaging in sexual conduct and memorializing it. Mere production of these videos or pictures may also result in psychological trauma to the teenagers involved.
Further, if these pictures are ultimately released, future damage may be done to these minors' careers or personal lives. These children are not mature enough to make rational decisions concerning all the possible negative implications of producing these videos.
All that concern over negative implications, psychological trauma, and damage to careers and personal lives is quite touching, but let me ask Judge Wolf a simple question: How much damage are you doing to their careers and personal lives by tagging them as sex offenders for the rest of their lives?
Asshole. You know what you do to a couple of kids who've made a sex video of themselves? You yell at them for an hour for being idiots, erase the video, take their damned cameras away, and ground them for a couple of months! Jeez.
Pop Quiz: The day before his 18th birthday, Jeremy gets on a boat and sails to the international date line. He lies down in his cabin so that the dateline crosses right through his body, with his upper half to the west of it and his lower half to the east. The upper half of his body has crossed into the next day, where he's 18 years old, but the lower half of his body is still in the day before and therefore it's under 18. Jeremy then grabs a video camera and films himself masturbating. Is he guilty of child pornography?
Answer: No, because the international date line doesn't pass through Florida.
(Hat tip: Radley Balko)
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