Legal News Headlines

 
Copyright 2008 The Times-Picayune Publishing Company

 May 22, 2008 Thursday

SECTION: NATIONAL; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 475 words

BYLINE: By Bruce Alpert, Washington bureau

BODY: 

WASHINGTON -- U.S. House and Senate negotiators will try to resolve differences between the two chambers on legislation designed to protect children who use social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace from sexual predators.

The Senate passed its version of the bill late Tuesday by voice vote. It includes a provision by Sen. David Vitter, R-La., to close a loophole that has allowed people to escape prosecution for viewing sexually explicit images of children if they didn't actually download the material.

"The heinous nature of these crimes demands that we take additional steps to prevent access to these images so that we might in turn better protect children," Vitter said.

The bill adopted by the Senate, and sponsored by presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain of Arizona and Democrat Charles Schumer of New York, requires convicted sex offenders to register their e-mail addresses and instant messaging names with a government database. Sites like Facebook and MySpace then could deny access to those listed on the database.

"The Internet is likely the greatest invention of the 21st century; however, it has also brought ready access to millions of children to would-be sexual predators," McCain said.

The American Civil Liberties Union had raised concerns that the Vitter provision might catch people who inadvertently access sexual images of children on their computers.

But Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., who added the Vitter provision to the Senate bill, said it sets up a two-step process to ensure that the only people facing prosecution are those who intentionally access such images. According to Kyl, a successful prosecution would require prosecutors to show that that the defendant purposely, "that is not accidentally," clicked the link to the site in question and did so with the intent to have "child pornography appear on his computer screen."

In two recent cases, courts ruled that individuals arrested for viewing sexually explicit imaged of children could not be prosecuted unless they took specific steps to download the material. In one case, an appellate court vacated the conviction of a man whose computer had between 15,120 and 19,000 sexually graphic images of children because it found no evidence he knew the images had been captured automatically on his computer's cache files.

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision released Monday, said a 2003 federal law aimed at sexually explicit material of children on the Internet can be used to prosecute people who distribute or sell such material even if it doesn't depict children. Prosecution under the law is permissible, the Supreme Court ruled, if the person believes the images include children, or convinced the would-be recipient that children were photographed.

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Bruce Alpert can be reached at bruce.alpert@newhouse.com or (202) 383-7861.

LOAD-DATE: May 22, 2008