Members of the New York Legislature are working to take swift action in response the state’s highest court ruling it is legal to view child porn.
The New York Court of Appeals ruled unanimously last week that viewing child porn online is not necessarily a crime. Morality in Media (MIM) president Pat Truman tells OneNewsNow the decision came in a case where authorities found more than 100 illegal images stored in the browser cache of a former Marist College professor’s work computer.
http://liarcatchers.com/pedophile_tracking.html
In 2007, college technicians were examining the malfunctioning hard drive when they encountered the porn, much of which was downloaded and stored. This ruling does not change James Kent’s 141 convictions in connection to downloading child pornography, but it does reverse the two convictions dealing with porn discovered in the cache.
Pat Trueman”What they said is as long as you don’t download the material or take possession of it in some way, then you’re free to do that,” explains Trueman. “Well, of course this is a pedophile’s dream, and you’re going to have more child pornography produced and distributed because people in New York are free to view it now.”
He calls the ruling “an outrage.”
“This means that an individual can go online, look at child pornography, look at streaming video of children being raped, and that’s not a crime in New York,” the MIM president laments. “It is a crime in, I think, virtually every other state. It’s certainly a crime under federal law.”
He adds that the court “seemed to have bent over backwards to protect those who are looking at child pornography in New York.”
But Truman believes the ruling will be short-lived. In fact, within 24 hours of the court decision, New York lawmakers had already drafted legislation that would address the problem.
To counter similar rulings by two other federal appeals courts, Congress in 2008 amended federal child porn statuses to include language making it a crime to “knowingly access” child porn.
