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"Accidental" Download Sending 22-Year-Old Man To Prison
An anonymous reader writes "Two years ago, Matthew White searched Limewire for porn. He was looking for 'College Girls Gone Wild,' but ended up downloading some images of child pornography. This was accidental, according to White, and he quickly deleted the images. A year later, the FBI showed up on his family's doorstep and asked to search the computer. After thorough sleuthing, the FBI found some images 'deep within the hard drive.' According to White, the investigators agreed that he himself could not have accessed the files anymore. Matthew now faces 20 years in jail for possession of child pornography. On advice from his lawyer, he intends to plead guilty so that he will 'hopefully' end up with 3.5 years in jail, 10 years probation and a registration as a sex offender. 'The FBI could not comment on this specific case, but said if child pornography is ever downloaded accidentally, the user needs to call authorities immediately. They may confiscate your computer, but it's better than the alternative.'"
Absolutely ridiculous
What's a district attorney to do when someone anonymously sends the D.A. an email with kiddie porn attached? Technically, the D.A. downloaded it.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
"Oh HAI, I just downloaded some kiddie pron... by mistake of course you understand"
yeah, I can see that one working out well...
Matt is pleading guilty on the advice of his public defender in hopes of getting a three and a half year sentence.
In other words, he doesn't have the money to actually fight this.
DO NOT CALL THE AUTHORITIES
Worst idea ever. If you actually have undeleted CP on your computer you will get 20 years.
The only safe thing to do is destroy the hard drive.
Should always maintain your innocence in these type of cases because the guilty plea will haunt you the rest of your life. 3.5 years is still ridiculous.
If the FBI shows up at your door and asks to search your computer, the correct answer is 'No.'
Typically, neither do people who are innocent.
Never talk to the police (even if you're perfectly innocent).
'The FBI could not comment on this specific case, but said if child pornography is ever downloaded accidentally, the user needs to call authorities immediately.'
At which point you've just confessed to trafficking in child porn. No, the proper thing to do is have a secure file deletion utility to nuke all evidence on your system.
Child porn has just become way too much of a boogeyman these days. Even if he had downloaded the images to look at - what harm would it have caused? He didn't ruin some girls life by looking at pictures that already exist.
Personally, just to get around stupid cases like this, I'd say that simple POSSESSION of child pornography shouldn't even be illegal. The point is the harm done to the actual children. By that token PRODUCTION should be illegal as that's when the harm is done. BUYING it (through cash or barter) should also be illegal as it finances production of more material. Other than that? Having a picture or video on your hard drive hurts no one, and it isn't going to turn someone into a stark raving mad child molester anymore than playing GTA turns them into a murderer.
If simple possession were not against the law then every one of these borderline gray area cases like this would go away.
In my opinion, it's irrelevant whether or not he downloaded the images on purpose. The connection between downloading an image off of limewire and the sexual abuse of a child is so tenuous it's absurd. The only way people can justify it is to make up crazy hypotheticals and market demand theories which are used in no other context.
... to fire his attorney and enter a plea of not guilty. If I were him I would fight to the end to avoid the felony conviction. They said he is in his early twenties with no criminal record - why screw that up now? Even if he spent years fighting the charges, and drove himself to bankruptcy in the process, it would still be less of a problem to his future than taking the felony conviction and serving 3.5 years in prison.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Whatever the (dis)merits of the application of the law are here you Americans really, really need to shorten your prison sentences.
Where I live (Finland), it's hard to actually be imprisoned for 20 years even if you murder someone. Sure, technically killers get lifetime sentences, but they are mostly let out after a decade or so.
And despite us technically having lots of killers and other criminals on the loose, this country is very safe. I believe the science actually says that prisons manufacture and "enhance" criminals.
Why? Because the prosecutor and judge will tell the jury that the law makes no distinction between accidental possession and intentional possession.
Although the jury has the legal right of nullification, the judge and prosecutor will tell them that "this is what the law says you have to do" and the jury will convict, thinking they HAVE to.
The summary states that if you accidentally download kiddie porn you need to call the cops asap. Typically, people who are guilty or trying to hide something don't call the cops on themselves.
Yes but the summary also states that accidentally downloading child porn will get you 22 years in prison.
No thank you, I will not be calling the cops to have myself sent to prison for 22 years for not doing anything wrong.
This is shocking and appalling and must stop. This sort of thing makes it impossible to be able to even look at webpages on the net. What if one accidentily clicks on a link without knowing what it goes to and ends up with these files in their web browser cache? Clicking on a link is not enough to show intent, we cannot go on a wild witch hunt where everyone is assumed guilty until proven innocent. Under the law, it is the act of taking pictures of children in a sexually suggestive way is what should be considered illegal. For some time it has been argued that those who were purchasing such material were helping to contribute to this. However, an accidental download of such a thing does not contribute in any material way to it whatsoever and in most cases, such as we see here, is completely accidental. There are serious problems with this. This is like arresting a person for seeing a blank sheet of paper on a sidewalk, picking it up and noticing that on the other side there was child porn, since they had simply picked it up and held it. The notion is so outrageous and this is exactly what is going on here. This has nothing to do about protecting children and these prosecutions are not protecting children. That is NOT what this dragnet is about. They are NOT protecting children but they are attacking and destroying the lives of completely innocent people. In fact, many childrens lives have already been destroyed because they took a picture of themselves and simply had the picture on their cell phone. This is about thought control and precrime, because by accidentily downloading this, no one anywhere has been harmed, all it is a copy of bits. Really, this massive abuse of the law needs to stop.
The law makes no distinction if the child porn you possess was obtained accidentally or intentionally.
Its just like buying a used car from a drug dealer and going across a border checkpoint.. The sniffing dogs smell some dope that got stashed underneath the seat and YOU are the one who gets put in prison.
I'm not a libertarian but even I can see how utterly broke and immoral the system has become to get to such a point.
Calling the cops is a complete gamble. The cops will likely say "you have child porn, I am required to arrest you and charge you with possession, you can explain it to the judge".
Best thing to do is a low-level multi-pass format, or a new HD. But that is if you *know* that you downloaded CP. If you don't know, cops may bust down your door some months later, seize your computer, then charge you once they find a thumbnail in some cache folder that was deleted 4 months ago.
Do the math. What's the most popular porn? Girls as close to 18 as possible. Combine that with user submitted porn. Combine that with typical porn viewing habits, i.e. way too much. Now do some stats. Who's leftover that doesn't have something illegal in their cache? No one who looks at lots of porn, that's for sure. Face it. If someone doesn't like you, they can mess your life up financially, politically, emotionally, really anything they fell like if they are malicious.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
What this speaks -- loudly and clearly -- to me is that the national tapping of any and all communication lines is complete. And, when things are slow and the FBI can't find a terrorist cell or -power group to take down, they troll their logs, and look to hang someone that no one would defend.
I'm sure that both the EFF and the ACLU will jump in here any minute now...
It just makes the case for using cryptography in everything you do online. I don't know how far it goes though. It may be that they finally laid off Zimmerman because they have enough horsepower to break anything that bubbles up to the surface as potentially interesting.
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
Because the words "Child porn" deactivate the cerebral cortex.
You can't expect thought on the subject. You can't expect a rational examination of the arguments, actions or context. People are stupid enough to begin with; when you bring this subject into the fold any trace of intelligence completely disappears.
I posted something similar to this in the comments to the article, but I thought I would start the discussion here too. For those of you who are inclined to rip on the public defender for letting this guy take the plea, bear in mind that the PD is probably handling about a thousand other cases (no exaggeration), not to mention that he barely makes a living wage. Public Defenders' offices are criminally underfunded compared to the DAs, who have the full backing of the State.
Matt White's attorney probably had no choice but to take the plea and dispose of the case quickly. The system is designed so that the PDs can't take anything to trial on account of the sheer volume of cases they have to manage; they're forced to plead everything out and pray they get a good deal. (If they took even a small fraction of their cases to trial, their other clients would be waiting for years to have their cases heard, and there's this pesky little piece of paper that guarantees people the right to a speedy trial. (Of course, it also guarantees the right to effective counsel, but the bar for what constitutes "effective" is ridiculously low.)
It's a win-win for the people who matter: the DA gets to scratch another kill mark into his desk, the prison system gets another warm body it can use to justify its budget, the politicians who depend on prisons to keep the headcounts in their districts high get another "constituent" who can't vote, plus they get to claim they're "tough on crime" and are "protecting the children".
The fact that an (arguably) innocent man has his life ruined as a result doesn't even factor into the equation. He and the public defender are pawns. It's not that the $ystem hates them, it's that, to the people who run the show, they truly, truly do not matter.
So the moral of the story is: if you accidentally download CP, pull the plug on the computer, rip out the hard drive, and destroy it immediately. (Okay, maybe you can leave it powered up for the time it takes to back up your documents, &c., but no longer. It's hammer time.)
Hasn't the music industry spent billions of dollars in advertisement and legal fees trying to convince us illegal downloading of music harms the music industry?
If so we should be thanking this man for harming the supporters of child pornography. Even if it was unintentional and immediately deleted.
Now I am going to destroy any credibility I had by quoting Captain Jean-Luc Picard. "I don't know how to communicate this, or even if it is possible. But the question of justice has concerned me greatly of late. And I say to any creature who may be listening, there can be no justice so long as laws are absolute. Even life itself is an exercise in exceptions. "
He will never get employment and maybe he will even get killed by a vigilante who knows the kid is guilty.
And for those of you named Mathew White, you're going to have to deal with it too on some level - people like to jump to conclusions.
This is were the Internet shows its evil side.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
He is represented by a public defender, which means he can't afford a new lawyer, and his current lawyer can't afford to put together a respectable case.
The FBI bait sites are awesome, because they don't care how downloaded the image, just that you made the request. So, people have found out what the bait images are, apparently, and like to "FBI Roll" people by either linking to them directly, or even better, putting them as a 1x1 image hidden somewhere on an innocuous page. That way you never even see it, but it's in your browser cache now, so when the FBI comes knocking after your download, it'll be there. Somebody needs to step this program up a notch, and start FBI rolling every major newscaster, reporter, media executive, and politician (big and small). Until that happens, nobody gives a shit. Nobody cares that some innocent guy goes to jail for 3.5 years and can never get a job ever again and dies homeless, nobody cares in the slightest. Nobody even cares when a 17 year old girl gets 10 years for taking a pic of her tits and sending it to her boyfriend. Because she's a pedophile, it says so right here in the charges, anybody defending her is also a pedophile. And in fact, since she's underage, anybody defending her is a DOUBLE pedophile. You can imagine, a double pedophile is not something you want to be. That's right, the war on child porn is so bad, people won't even care about a white, privileged, teenage girl! I think you'd have to get every last person in the house and senate indited at once, because if you even only got half of them, the other half would turn on them like rabid wolves, cheering and applauding that the bait system works.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
The true moral of the story, is quit breaking the fucking law, and if you see someone else breaking the law (like distributing child porn) fucking tell someone. Do those two things and you'll be fine unless someone decides to railroad you. Then you could be screwed, but your record will be your best defense.
In the land of many laws we are all lawbreakers.
I have to assume this guy is not guilty, not because of the presumption of innocence, but rather by the lack of accessible cp on his computer. Pedophiles don't just quit cold turkey, and even if he is a pedophile, quit cold turkey (doesn't happen), hey great, he's fixed his problem on his own. Going with that:
Where does the government keep finding 12 morons to vote guilty in the jury box? I know this particular guy's case isn't going to a jury, but his lawyer seems to think he's screwed if he does. With easy to explain facts like this, both the DA (who wouldn't bring charges that would hurt his win %) and defense thinks there is a high likely hood of conviction? Are you kidding me?
And how many CRAZY guilty verdicts have we read about? Why are juries stacked with idiots too stupid to see that they could just as likely be in the defendant's seat for a multitude of offenses?
Quick side story: *all numbers, except age are fudged to prevent recrimination* I'm 32 (so far so good on my plan to outlive Jesus) and have been on a Jury 1 time. It was a drug charge, which I kinda figured out during jury selection based on the questions I was asked, so I shaped my answers accordingly. It ended up being a trial of a 19 year old kid found with 5 marijuana plants in a "grow box" (nice setup, bought online for like 2k, could of built his own for 800). The prosecution presented their case, the defense only called the defendant, who swore up and down that they were only for personal use (we're not in a medical marijuana state), and the defendant pretty much begged for mercy. I swear at this point one of my co-juror's started to tear up. Final arguments came and went, and then the Judge, the last arbiter of law said (paraphrasing here) that we were only to determine if he possessed the plants, and if so, to find him guilty.
We got back to the jury room and as I'm told we're not supposed to do, but always gets done regardless, we took a vote. 11-1. IANAL but I believed without knowing that if I gave my real reason for not wanting to convict that I'd be replaced (we had 2 alternates). I've never had to choose my wording so carefully, meanwhile the rest of the Jury kept saying things like : "the judge said we had to vote guilty" and "It doesn't matter if I think he did anything wrong, the judge said he did wrong" (that last one, I SWEAR TO GOD, was uttered word for word, i will never forget a syllable). It took 2 hours of carefully worded analogies to sway 1 other to my side, from there we got to 3 in 10 minutes, at 4, the whole room switched. Let me say that again, at 4 ppl, the remaining 8 switched over, not out of a sense of civic duty, but because they were tired and wanted to go home. WITH A MAN'S LIFE IN THE BALANCE.
When we returned our verdict, the judge didn't look at what the foreman wrote (he opened it, looked at its general direction and refolded it), when the foreman not guilty, the Judge damn near fell out of his chair, the DA did a real life triple take, and the defense attorney looked like a deer in headlights. The point is that all 3 professionals INCLUDING the defense attorney, were shocked that the jury failed to rubber stamp guilty on this guy.
After we were relieved 4 of the other jurors came to me and admitted thru conversation that they smoked pot and didn't want to vote guilty at all, but thought they had to because the judge had told them to. As they were talking, all I could think was, "So this is how democracy ends, with sheep"
"you know why? Because we got the bomb, thats why" -Dennis Leary
"Its just like buying a used car from a drug dealer and going across a border checkpoint.."
You can have your local K-9 unit run the dog through any car you buy if you ask nicely. The military will do so too, and when I was in the USAF I
had them do one car I bought as a precaution.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Unfortunately, when there's secret laws, and so many laws that lawyers have to specialize in small sections of the law, and still get it wrong, it's impossible to be a law-abiding citizen.
...Imagine someone hating someone else (yes - that happens)
that someone gets an idea based on White's misfortune:
1) Send some kiddie porn images (or just family pictures of naked kids) to someone you hate
2) Do it repeatedly a few times, just to make sure they land on his harddisk
3) Secretly tip the Feds that he downloads child porn or has an interest in naked kids
The feds seizes his harddisk, he says someone anonymous sent it to him, but it doesn't help him - because it could be a child porn ring - which he "perhaps" is a part of, and they found them deleted on his harddisk. He's basically screwed! You just killed a man.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Innocent people are more likely to be flustered, etc., when confronted with allegations of a crime.
They'll act guilty, whereas the true crook will look you right in the eye and lie. He or she has nothing to lose by lying.
The old story of "liars can't look you straight in the eye" is a lie. Crooks do it all the time. An honest person would be ashamed tha people would even *think* that they did something wrong, which is why they act in ways that pop psychology says "they're acting guilty."
"No warrant, no entry. I have nothing to hide, but I do value my privacy, and you should be spending your time catching crooks, not trying to weasel around the law like a crook. Have a nice day."
The true moral of the story, is quit breaking the fucking law, and if you see someone else breaking the law (like distributing child porn) fucking tell someone. Do those two things and you'll be fine unless someone decides to railroad you. Then you could be screwed, but your record will be your best defense.
The problem is that we have so many laws, and even the most innocent thing can bring down the law. We had a case here with a roadside coffee stand on a farm. The law says you can operate a concession incidental to the farming use. Well, the way the economy tanked, the farm quit making any money. In the meantime, the coffee shop is still selling lattes, and pretty soon, it's the major money maker for these folks. OOOOPS! Here comes the law, they have a "nonconforming business use" and have to get laywers to keep from getting fined, shut down, have liens put on their property, all because their farm income went into the crapper.
Another case: A guy builds a model railroad, one of those that you can ride on, where the cars are about 12" high. He gives rides to neighbors and such. OOOPS! The state comes down on him for having an illegal amusement park. All because he wanted to share his hobby with his friends. And they actually made him dismantle the whole thing.
So, do you have any hobbies? Any side income? Do you do anything at all? Then you're probably breaking the law.
This "theory" has pretty similar validity to that of the "phlogiston theory".
If it were true, images of all kinds would promote all sorts of other behaviours. Vanilla porn would cause wide-spread rape. Images of murder, warfare, terrorism etc (all which appear hourly on TV and are watched by hundreds of millions of people) would lead to daily rampages of thousands of axe wielding murderers running through the streets of any country with large cable TV reach like, say, Canada. Murderers competing with thousands of bomb-totting terrorists, followed shortly by whole armies of home-grown para-military-militias fighting each other ... and on and on.
The truth is much simpler: as someone pointed out on this thread, "fighting" child molestation is a sure-fire short-cut to political power as mentioning it has the apparent effect of completely disabling higher brain functions in majority of the populace, and its no different than any other drummed-up bogeyman of the days past used for this purpose by truly evil charlatans, like fifth-column Communists, witches, demonic possession etc and so on.
Total bullshit. Children age and become adults and the simple fact is that human brain's facilities for facial recognition are insufficient to maintain recognition without any other circumstantial links (research shows that we recognize our old acquaintances based on other cues such as a series of contextual memories across time). This is why police has to use computers to "age" photos of children gone missing for more than a few years - people simply cannot recognize them. And if you cannot be recognized, any claims of "compounded harm" are simply a result of suggestions of the "holy warriors" and "therapists" whose business is to ensure that any and all claims are suitably exaggerated, logic and empirical evidence be damned.
I just took a look at that monkey attack lady that appeared on Oprah, did I just create demand for more monkey attacks on people?
FBI linkbait was actually covered on Slashdot itself last year.
What a victory for the tax payer. First we have the thrill of supporting some lard assed FBI personnel. Then we have the joy of paying for a trial as well as the prosecutor's time. And then for the next wonderful thrill we get to pay a huge sum to put this poor guy in prison! And then we get the absolute joy have having him on a sex offenders' list so that he will not be employable or able to get housing for the rest of his life which will trigger welfare and public support until the poor schmuck is dead.
So the guy gets his entire life trashed and the public gets a whopping expense. With a logic stream such as this one the people behind this kind of law should have been in charge of the war in Vietnam. Entire new definitions of victory abound!
Most juries are pretty smart - I was on one, and the few dumbasses among the jury candidates were all weeded out. They are made up of the average joe citizen and despite what you may think, you yourself ARE the average joe citizen. You are not a legal expert, but you are a reasonably intelligent person perfectly able to recognize most bullshit when you hear it.
Also, the requirements for conviction are note "I think you dunnit", they are things like A.)Intended to possess child porn, B.)actively sought out child porn, C.)actually did keep child porn in his position for a reasonable period of time. There may be more for child porn, but those are similar to the types of requirements for the felony theft case I sat on.
Furthermore, the judge makes it very clear that you must believe each one of those criteria beyond a reasonable doubt. That's not "I'm pretty sure it's true", that's "There is no reasonable alternative". It also applies to each one individually, 2 out of 3 doesn't cut it. It does not mean it is impossible for it to have happened differently, it just means there is no other reasonable alternative. If there IS an alternative, and it is reasonable, there is no option but to aquit. You may be certain he did it, but his guilt has not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
Last but certainly not least, jurors are definitely aware that, with the stroke of a pen they are sending a man to jail for years. You are influencing the future of a man's life with this action, and it is not taken lightly. Even a case where a guy might get off in 6 months with good behavior, it's still heavy.
Certainly innocent people go to jail, even with all of this. Evidence can be looked at more than one way, and sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. If the truth of what happened doesn't seem possible, the defendant is in jeopardy. But the odds are stacked against this, and are system is designed to prefer letting an innocent go free than sending a guilty man to jail.
That's why I think this guy is full of shit. If what he says is the full truth, a third grader could keep him out of prison. A lawyer, even a public defender, doesn't tell you to take a plea unless he thinks you are screwed, and he certainly wouldn't think that if all this guy did were accidentally download a kiddy porn pic. Hell if what he said were true he could go to court, plead not guilty, and just sit there the entire trial, with no representation and never saying a word and the jury would almost certainly find him not guilty.
In fact, if that deleted download were all they had against him, the Grand Jury would not have thought there was enough evidence to go to trial, and would have told the prosecuters to go pound sand.
That he is pleading guilty instead of defending himself, especially when there hasn't been a plea bargain, tells me that he is guilty as sin and just trying to mitigate the damage by playing the victim.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller