Overzealous child porn prosecution

The Santa Cruz Sentinel reports on a prosecution of a local Norwegian physics grad student:

A man will stand trial on felony charges that he took sexually explicit photographs of his young daughter, a judge ruled Thursday.

Alexander Morisse, 34, was arrested after the girl's mother found photographs of the then 4-year-old girl in a trash bin on a laptop computer he'd given to his daughter.

The mother, who is separated from Morisse, reported the images to Berkeley police in April but because the photos were taken while the family was living in Santa Cruz, it's being prosecuted here.

Morrise and his attorney, Kellin Cooper, argued Morrise took the photos because the child had been extremely curious about her body. Morisse told police he took the photos because "I was trying to facilitate her curiosity about her body in the best way I knew at the time."

Friends described him in testimony this week as a loving and devoted father, and told Judge Rebecca Connolly that they didn't believe he had any sort of sexual intent or purpose in taking the pictures. Cooper said both Morisse and the girl's mother were very open people and nudity was common in the household.

I don't know about Norway, but lots of people think nothing of letting a 4yo kid run around the house nude and taking private pictures. These pictures were not posted or distributed in any way. So how did the cops get involved? You guessed, a child custody dispute.

Taking a photograph of one's own child naked is not necessarily illegal, but rather, is based on several factors including the image's focal point and whether the image is intended to elicit a sexual response in the viewer.

Prosecutor Michael Gilman argued the photographs clearly constituted child pornography.

"I'll submit this is a unique household and this is a unique case," he said, but maintained the images were "objectively pornographic."

Cooper contended the girl's mother reported the photographs to police to assist her pending custody battle with Morisse. The mother denied that in testimony Thursday, and said she believed Morisse posed a threat to her daughter and that was why she reported it.

No, it is not a unique household, not a unique case, and the images were not objectively pornographic. As the article explains, there is no objective standard for child porn. It depends on the intended response in the viewer, and that is subjective by definition, and not objective.

The paper also had another story about a local man facing child porn charges based on some images found in his browser. He also had no idea that he was doing anything wrong.

Traditionally, a criminal prosecution requires mens rea, meaning that the accused has to understand that he was doing something wrong.

I have not see the images at issue here, but my gut tells me that both me are completely innocent. No one has any control over the browser cache. I look at mine, and there are all sorts of pictures that I have never seen. The browser puts them there as its algorithms try to anticipate the user.

There is nothing wrong with taking a picture of your own nude 4yo kid. I never did, just because I heard horror stories like this.

Apparently we have a sick and overzealous prosecutor who cannot look at a toddler picture without thinking perverted things. He is the one who should be in prison.

Joint equal child custody should be automatic, so parents do not have incentives to make these sorts of allegations. The destructive nature of these allegations is far worse than the actual images, even if the lewd do have some sort of lewd interpretation.

Someday this poor soul will go back to Norway, and this will be his story: I came to America to get a doctoral degree in physics. My wife hung out with a bunch a Santa Cruz Berkeley lesbians, became a feminist, and filed for divorce. To get sole custody of our daughter, she reported some innocent toddler pictures that were on an old computer. I served 2 years in prison and had to register for the rest of my life as a sex offender. I never got my PhD and was deported. America is not the land of the free.