Legal News

Judge Decries Child Porn Sentence; LB Colleague Gets a Gavel Bang!

By Dan Slater

Are prison sentences of 15, 20 years or longer appropriate for those convicted of computer-based child exploitation crimes, such as downloading sexual images of minors?

It’s a topic that interested Law Blog colleague Amir Efrati a couple months back. In an article entitled “Making Punishments Fit the Most Offensive Crimes,” Efrati, the Journal’s white-collar reporter, took some time away from his beat to write about the hefty prison sentences for child porn offenders and how those sentences had led some judges to rebel.

Judge Gilbert S. Merritt (pictured), of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, seems to be the most recent judge to rebel publicly, and in a way that made us here at the Law Blog beam with pride, and made Efrati blush. In a Sixth Circuit opinion issued today, Judge Merritt, dissenting from a majority opinion that upheld the 17-1/2 year sentence of a man who pleaded guilty to four counts of knowing possession of child pornography, begins:

As a recent October 23, 2008, Wall Street Journal article by Amir Efrati points out, our federal legal system has lost its bearings on the subject of computer-based child pornography. Our “social revulsion” against these “misfits” downloading these images is perhaps somewhat more rational than the thousands of witchcraft trials and burnings conducted in Europe and here from the Thirteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries, but it borders on the same thing. In 2008 alone the Department of Justice has brought 2,200 cases like this one in the federal courts. Some trial and appellate judges are sending these mentally ill defendants like Paull to federal prison for very long sentences. But the 17-1/2 year sentence for Paull may be the longest yet. He is a 65-year-old, psychologically disabled, former minister with Type 1 diabetes with many complications. How could this sentence be “not greater than necessary” to punish this crime?

(HT: How Appealing)

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on January 09, 2009 (boomark / email).