20 Images for 200 Years: Teacher Jailed for Possessing Child Pornography

The US Supreme Court refuses to hear an appeal by a teacher jailed for 200 years for possessing child porn.



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I find it amazing that in our society full of technological advances we still manage to do so many things that seem below our capabilities.

Rather than scapegoating, rather than upholding our societal honor, rather than crucifying one we should focus on the root cause of the dilemma: in this case, the websites hosting the child pornography, identifying the children in the images, and finding those who took them, financed them, and distributed them. The media is a dirty lens through which we see our society and ourselves. Big media buries the real issues while news stories like Ana Nicole Smith, which in reality is a private family issue dealing with a handful of people, takes precedence over situations that affect everyone.

This man's sentence is absurd, disproportionate to his crime, and a blatant failure of our justice system.

If hundreds of people associated with the recruiting of the underage children (who most likely did so violently, forcibly, illegally, and maliciously) were also associated with processing these pornographic images and subsequently profiting from their distribution on the internet, were making headlines for receiving 200-year sentences--I would not be so upset.

If our court system realized the flaws imbued in their rulings, such as assigning an arbitrary ten year sentence for every image (although there were reportedly thousands, and only 20 were used in determining a sentence), without taking into consideration that the real harm was done to those children before that man ever viewed those images--I would not be so upset.

If this court system did not hide behind the same curtain as the media, and use language to muddy the waters of truth, by using metaphors and doubletalk in order to hide the reality of events, such as saying a “200 year sentence” rather than saying “life”--I would not be so upset. The fatalistic ring of the world “life without parole” seems reserved for the most violent and hardened criminals and we need to use it sparingly lest its catchy ring lose its luster.

This man will spend his life behind bars because of images on child pornography on his computer. Keep in mind that the people who took those images, who host those images, who profit from those images and many of us who may have even seen those same images (viewing a 17 year old in a pornographic situation is considered child pornography) are not serving 200-year sentences. We should be thankful for that, for our justice system.