How strong is your defense against child porn charges?
This post was published 2 years 10 months 6 days ago and its content may not be valid anymore.If faced with charges revolving around the possession of child pornography on a household computer, how strong would your defense be. Based on the article published by ABC, sixteen-yr. old Matthew Bandy is being charged with nine counts of posession of child pornography. Bandy’s home state, Arizona, is one of the toughest states in the country imposing a mandatory 10-yr. sentence per count. Nine times 10-yrs. equates to 90-yrs. behind bars – consecutive, back-to-back terms.
Bandy’s attorney is using the defense that Matthew was unaware of any illegal images being uploaded from his computer. How could this be possible? Simple. The Bandy’s family computer is littered with infected files meaning that any outsiders could access the system. Matthew does admit to having viewed pornographic images, but none of the illegal type alleged to have been uploaded from the computer into a public Yahoo account.
Fortunately, the presiding judge possessed a little more sensibility concerning the case and invited Matthew to appeal. The two year long ordeal was resolved and Matthew would not be labeled a sex offender.
What would your immediate defense be if charged with possession of child pornography – assuming of course that you understand that such activity is illegal and unacceptable in modern society? It surprises me how prehistoric some individuals are concerning the dangers of the internet & technology.
I run Gentoo behind a firewall on my main computer, so I feel fairly safe. However, I have an old dual-G4 hooked up to my TV for movies and music. About two weeks ago I switched the A/V single to the computer to check on some torrents and saw that there was a Spanish version of Firefox installed. There is nothing too important on the computer (only MP3s and videos) so I wasn’t too concerned; in fact, mostly amused.
Then, about a week ago, while studying and listening to MP3s, I was distracted when I noticed the iTunes visualizer turned off, and saw the mouse moving around (some one had logged in, either through VLC or Mac’s sharing thing). It was a bit more freaky seeing it live. I took the computer off my firewall’s DMZ, and turned on OS X’s firewall (it was always just easier using DC++ and downloading torrents without that stuff).
This stuff happens I guess.
Some VNC clients like Chicken of the VNC support Bonjour networks. Are there other people on your network?
my god, in the first place, I can’t even imagine a person being in jail for 10 years just for looking at 1 pornographic image, and i cant even believe a 16 year old would be in jail for 90 years… he didnt even kill anyone…. geez.
and what kind of prosecutors are in Arizona to do everything they possible can to make sure a 16 year old gets the longest jail term they can give him, as well as ignoring lie-detector tests and psychiatric exams that proved the boy innocent
imagine seeing your boy get a 90-year sentence for something you know he didn’t do? thats scary stuff.
This kind of thing absolutely terrifies me. It’s like a full-blown, criminal version of the RIAA/MPAA witch hunts. I imagine they could have even tried to pin the crime on the kid based on the logs they used to find him, assuming the “hard evidence” wasn’t still on the computer. I completely agree that child pornography is a horrible thing that should be fought, but the way situations like this are sometimes handled is insane. Thank God the judge had is head on straight.
Hi, this is Jeanne Bandy, Matt’s mom. I’m a complete amateur at blogging, just learning how to do this, but on behalf of Matt and our whole family, I want to thank all of you who have expressed support for us and outrage about what happened. Matt, as you may know, is restricted from using the computer for anything but school or work by the terms of the probation he got stuck with. I hope all of you will visit our website, http://www.justice4matt.com, and write to the legislators and other people listed on our “How You Can Help page.” If you want to write to me or Matt, the best way to do that is the Contact Us form at our site, because we’re trying to avoid spam as much as we can. And keep on blogging about us please, I’m told it really helps to put pressure on lawmakers and law enforcers to make change in the system, and it educates people who don’t know how easily the same thing could happen to them. Finally, my apology for having to send out somewhat of a “form message” to bloggers – we’re swamped (thank God) in supportive response and I’m just trying to keep up. I’m having to borrow a friend’s computer and his Internet access because we cut ours off some time ago – but we’re going to go online again soon, with MAXIMUM security. I’ll try to respond more personally soon. THANK YOU AGAIN!
I am not sure what role I am playing here, so just hear me out.
People get horny, and often look at porn to help themselves. This is well known. We also know there are pedophiles and people that seek help with pedophilia. When people get caught/arrested for being pedophiles, they go to jail for some period of time. Then comes the Internet and what not issue. I am going to pass over the whole dateline-20/20 thing, but look at looking at child porn itself. A lot of people went to their search engine of choice and searched for boobs or something similar, you wouldn’t get child porn I bet if you looked at the first few pages. Search engine developers noticed that even though people has 50+ pages of hits, they only look at the first one or two pages. That being said, people that look at child porn, the excuse of clicking a site dedicated to such stuff is total bs. If you click on a link that said see my big breasts, I am almost willing to bet 10 times out of 10 you will not see a little kid doing whatever.
I think that the people that look up child porn need some help. I don’t think solely jail is the answer because they need more intense treatment. Then going on the jail issue, in the United States are jails are packed full, and we can’t afford to hold people in jail for something that is better served in a psych ward. Now those that take the pictures of the kids and/or the people that put them online are the ones that need to go to jail.
Here’s a scenario – you are at work and your co-worker who would like your job or just has an axe to grind against you waits until you get up and leave the room – he downloads child porn to your computer and then deletes the images and walks away – only to call the police to report that you are downloading child pornography. The police investigate and find images on your hard drive (co-worker deleted the images but did you reformat your computer? Even if you reformat the images can still be there in unallocated space) next thing you know you are looking at jail time – if you live in the state of AZ you are looking at 10 to 17 years for each image – can’t happen to you…think again!
I know and understand this scenario because it’s not happening to just Matt Bandy – it is happening to my own son who was 17 when the exact same nightmare that happened to Matt happened to my son! My son is looking at 60 to 144 years in prison – for images! Please, think about it – does anyone deserve to do a life prison sentence for looking at an image! I am against child pornography I think these people who do this to children deserve the book thrown at them. But my child is a victim too! He did not ask for images and none were found on his computer or the CD’s that he handed over to the police. My son is being charged because a detective in NY sent 2 CD’s to the Phoenix Police Dept. with 6 images on them. These CD’s could have been from anyone…anywhere…yet they decided to prosecute my son…what would you do if this were your child??? My son is a victim of the same over zealous Prosecuting Attorney Andrew Thomas and over zealous prosecutor Daniel Strange that went after Matt Bandy.
Andrew Thomas needs to be fired…and common sense needs to return to the Arizona Judicial System!
I’m finding myself amazed at how easily these prosecutions take place. I’m a network engineer and have in the past investigated internet/computer misuse for companies internally. I’m not a forensics expert by any stretch of the imagination. However, I find myself amazed by the “proof” that is accepted and the lengths a defense must be proven.
I can think of a thousand scenerios where next to anything could exist or be transfered to a persons computer without their knowledge. I’ve read case reviews of defenses where the accused has presented the possibility of trojans or virii compromising security or transferring images. The prosecution experts have testified that no such agent was found on the computer. Maybe the infection was cleaned after the damage had already occurred? As previously pointed out by an earlier poster, there are cases where more than one person had access to a particular computer. There are also issues with wireless access to gain access behind a firewall. There are several tools available to crack WEP keys and gain wireless access to another persons network.
I guess, it just startles me that the trend seems to be proving innocense rather than the proof of guilt. The term “beyond a reasonable doubt” seems to have lost it’s meaning entirely.
I still stand by my comments earlier regarding digital “evidence”. However, after reading a bit more about the case I discovered this:
“A burned CD was found in his home, which contained the same pornographic images of children found on his computer. The images were saved in a file named ‘Lolita’…”
That one might leave a bit too much to swallow the virus story. I have yet to encounter any virus that can burn a CD.
Here’s the official report:
http://www.maricopacountyattorney.org/Press/PDF/bandy_case_20070107.pdf
After reading this report, I’m not so ready to bash the prosecution anymore. Still it has left me with a few questions. Nevertheless, the fact that a CD was found near the computer with tons o child porn on it is quite suspicious. Will present my list of questions later. What do you guys think of this report?