ACLU Sues Penn Prosecutor For Empty Threat of Child Porn

TechDirt is reporting that the ACLU has stepped in on behalf of several teens facing the threat of child pornography charges in Pennsylvania for sharing nude pics of themselves. Unfortunately for a girl in New Jersey, she is facing much more than just a threat, as she was arrested yesterday for posting almost 30 explicit pictures of herself on MySpace for her boyfriend to see. "...the ACLU has sued the prosecutor on the girls' behalf, saying he shouldn't have threatened them with baseless charges — which haven't yet been filed — if they wouldn't agree to probation and a counseling program. The prosecutor says he was being 'proactive' in offering them a choice, but the ACLU says he shouldn't be using 'heavy artillery' to make the threats. As its attorney points out, teaching kids that this sort of behavior can bring all sorts of unwanted and unforeseen ramifications is a good idea, but threatening them with child-porn charges isn't the best way to do it."

Comments

How does this qualify as pornography?

[Aram Fingal]

This question is so obvious that I'm probably going to end up getting modded redundant but here goes anyway. My understanding is that something has to include sexual acts to be considered pornography. Nudity, by itself, is not pornography. Either the charges are baseless because of that or there is something more going on here than the story says. In other words, they weren't just nude pictures.

Re:drugs

[jeko]

Setting free those who were convicted of non-violent drug offenses then many will become tax paying employees...

Um, and these jobs are coming from where? Why do you think these people started selling drugs in the first place? Because that $90K Oracle DBA Manager job was so unfulfilling? There are notable exceptions, of course, but people generally turn to selling drugs because they can't find a niche in the straight economy to begin with. I remember reading a study a while back, and the "average" drug dealer makes something like $10 an hour when everything is taken into account.

Have you tried to find a job with a felony conviction on your record lately? We've got people with Masters degrees slinging coffee at Starbucks, and I don't mean just the MFAs. People who sold drugs for a living generally haven't finished their CCIE yet. You think these guys are going to take a job at the factory? I doubt their Chinese is good enough.

The sort of jobs these people could hold no longer exist in our economy. God knows I wish they did. The ridiculously high level of incarceration in our society, from a macro perspective, is more about masking the true unemployment rate than punishing/rehabilitating criminals.

The War on Drugs is bloody farce kept alive by a zombie bureaucracy against all reason. The people incarcerated by it are punished beyond conscience.

But don't think that closing the War on Drugs is going to be the end of the problem. All that's going to do is stop whitewashing over the rot and decay. Once we quit hiding behind this silly "War," the real work is going to begin.