NY State Governor, Andrew Cuomo, presumably right after making online child porn illegal. Photo by Pat Arnow
New York City, the self-proclaimed epitome of metropolitan modernity, just made viewing online child pornography illegal. Due to a technicality, it was completely fine, by law, to watch kiddie porn from a NY ISP address until last Friday, as long as you didn’t exert any kind of ownership over it, like saving files to your hard drive, or printing out screen grabs to Pritt Stick into your morally abhorrent Filofax of filth. Following perhaps the most bizarre logic known to man, it was basically completely A-OK to stream recorded child abuse 24/7, just as long as you didn’t download any of it.
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This was discovered back in May, when the case of James D. Kent, an assistant professor at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, came up for review. Kent was sentenced to four years in prison in 2009 for visiting websites built for juvenile-lusting degenerates, but the incriminating smut found on his computer was mostly made up of temporary files stored in his cache. Because the law regulating child porn was drafted when the web was still in its infancy, meaning the wording didn’t account for paedo-friendly web cache loopholes, a judicially unenforced grey area was born, providing an online Neverland for those of the preteen persuasion.
According to the federal court ruling, “For digital images to constitute evidence of knowing possession of child pornography, such images must be connected to something tangible (e.g., the hard drive), as they are when stored in a cache, and the defendant must be aware of that connection. To possess the images in the cache, the defendant must, at a minimum, know that the unlawful images are stored on a disk or other tangible material.” Because prosecutors couldn’t prove that Kent knew he had a cache, he technically shouldn’t have been done for what was stored in it. I guess ignorance really is bliss if you’re sexually attracted to minors.
State lawmakers spent years fumbling over an amendment, meaning Kent wasn’t instantly let loose to indulge in all the sexual depravity that had been building up inside his prison-subdued mind, but he was ultimately absolved of promoting sexual performance of a child and possession of child porn.
Upon the initial discovery of the loophole, Judge Victoria A. Graffeo was forced to admit, “the purposeful viewing of child pornography on the internet is now legal in New York”. Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam must have taken a battering in sex-tourist spending after that. Imagine the buzz on the kind of forums you never knowingly want to end up on: “A quick flight to JFK, a yellow taxi ride to pick up some salt beef sandwiches, before spending a romantic weekend away with yourself and your iPad. Sure beats the 12-hour slog to Asia!”
All this shouldn’t come as too much of a shock, however, considering New York is a state with a deep history of questionable legislature. The entirely self-enforced, regulated sport of mixed martial arts was outlawed in the mid-90s, but current mayor, Michael Bloomberg, backs a law that prohibits people from donating food to homeless shelters. Apparently it’s because the state can’t monitor the salt content in the food, which suggests that a slightly raised blood pressure in the city’s homeless population is a far bigger concern than little things like, y’know, starvation and death.
Weed possession was decriminalised in 1977, but displaying it in public view remains a misdemeanour, leaving New York with the enviable status of the cannabis arrest capital of the world, with over 50,000 stoners nabbed last year. I’m sure it’s just a weird coincidence that 87 percent of that figure happen to be either black or Latino, right?
Anyway, at least we can all breathe a bit easier knowing that, as soon as anyone in The Big Apple actively logs on to juvi-porn, they’re putting themselves in the firing line for a class E felony and up to five years in jail, under the lecherous eye of Big Al from Washington Heights.
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