Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> There is no blurry line here. Child abuse and child pornography are clearly defined terms. Justifying child abuse in a novel might be morally offensive, but is not a crime, abusing an actual child however, and publishing footage of it, is.

Okay, let me give an alternative situation then.

A 14 year old girl sends a sexual text message to her (also underage) boyfriend. In Minnesota, the 14-year-old-girl was charged with Child Pornography.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/juvenile-justice/minnesota-prosecu...

If you think morality is black-and-white, then you are going to cause issues to many people. There's nothing "black and white" about distributing child porn. There are unfortunately, a ton of gray areas.

Yes, there are clear-cut cases of CP that need to be banned. But you must ALWAYS be wary about the edge cases, lest you harm otherwise innocent people. A 14-year-old who sends naked pictures of herself to her friends is... well... objectionable, but it shouldn't result in a sex-crime on her permanent record.

They could be charged by making sending pictures of themselves to themselves.

This is the way it must be. Otherwise an underage person could, say, send nude photos of herself to all her teachers, call the FBI, and have them all arrested while she faces no penalty. If simply having the file on your computer is illegal, then any creator of this content, no matter what his or her age, must be liable.

There's no public interest in prosecuting a 15 year old who willingly sends an image of themself to another 15 year old.

It's a fucking stupid thing for them to do, but criminal justice system isn't the solution for that.

Except when the recipient forwards it on to his buddies and the picture then makes it into the Internet.

Even then you don't prosecute the person in the image, even if they took the photograph. You prosecute the people distributing the image.

So it's not the way it must be, if the existing insane laws are repealed.

Nope, if I hide cocaine in your house the crime is mine. If person X send person Y unsolicited CP with the intention of calling the police on them I am pretty sure X is committing a crime.

It might be hard for Y to prove this though.

That's not the way the law works with illegal pornography. There is no legal defense to possession.

To be more precise, in most jurisdictions, there's strict liability for possession of child pornography. Which means that mens rea, or even awareness of the crime, is not required.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_liability_(criminal)

That is a fairly programmatic, not judicious, interpretation of how the law and morality intersect. Maybe the people involved, law enforcement and the courts are a bit better than mere computers. Just a thought.

Minnesota’s criminal statute would have absolutely nothing to do with any federal statute or any other state’s criminal statute

Good news! If you are rich enough to pay and keep paying your lawyers then you can move the case to the federal venue either immediately or in appeals court. Now we have a standardized venue to actually discuess any gray areas or lack thereof

That’ll be $2000 for this “hour” of work to afford your freedom, thanks

You can't "remove" your state criminal case to federal court. You've confused a civil case with a criminal case brought by the state.

Thats pretty interesting, it seems there have been some narrow circumstances for removal of criminal cases from state to federal venue but not a viable option like in civil cases

Reply on news.ycombinator.com