This is honestly just disturbing. Apparently someone in New York doesn't think it should be illegal to view child pornography. MSNBC.com reports:
Viewing child pornography online isn't a crime, the New York Court of
Appeals ruled Tuesday in the case of a college professor whose work
computer was found to have stored more than a hundred illegal images in
its Web cache.
The court dismissed one of the two counts of promoting a sexual
performance of a child and one of the dozens of counts of possession of
child pornography on which James D. Kent was convicted. The court upheld
the other counts against Kent, an assistant professor of public
administration at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
Kent — who
said at his sentencing that he "abhorred" child pornography and argued
that someone else at Marist must have placed the images on his computer —
was sentenced to one to three years in state prison in August 2009.
The decision rests on whether accessing and viewing something on the
Internet is the same as possessing it, and whether possessing it means
you had to procure it. In essence, the court said no to the first
question and yes to the second.
"Merely viewing Web images of
child pornography does not, absent other proof, constitute either
possession or procurement within the meaning of our Penal Law," Senior
Judge Carmen Beauchamp Ciparick wrote for a majority of four of the six
judges.
"Rather, some affirmative act is required (printing,
saving, downloading, etc.) to show that defendant in fact exercised
dominion and control over the images that were on his screen," Ciparick
wrote. "To hold otherwise, would extend the reach of (state law) to
conduct — viewing — that our Legislature has not deemed criminal."
In other words, "the purposeful viewing of child pornography on the
internet is now legal in New York," Judge Victoria A. Graffeo wrote in
one of two concurring opinions that agreed with the result but not with
the majority's reasoning.
Kent's attorney, Nathan Z. Dershowitz,
told msnbc.com that he hadn't yet had a chance to talk to his client, so
he couldn't discuss what they would do next. But he agreed with Graffeo
that the ruling means that "in New York, there is no crime" in simply
viewing child pornography.
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