Child Pornography Law Gets Supreme Court Boost

In an effort to stop the spread of child pornography through the Internet, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the Protect (Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to end the Exploitation of Children) Act, a piece of legislation passed in 2003 that considers offering or soliciting images of children that are explicit sexually a crime.

The Protect Act is quite strict, especially as it has been designed for such an ugly act as child pornography. The law holds good irrespective of what the material in question is – they could be totally computer-generated, or photographs of adults that have been manipulated digitally. The law holds good even if the whole setup is a fraud and there actually is no such material in reality.

The law being discussed was a response to a ruling that the Supreme Court had made in 2002, when it declared an already-existing law that banned mere possession of material that was supposedly child pornography even in the event the material did not actually show children in sexually explicit images.

The Protect Act was upheld by a 7-2 majority. Wrote Justice Antonin Scalia, “Offers to provide or requests to obtain child pornography are categorically excluded from the First Amendment.” According to Justice Scalia, the law looked to take out the First Amendment problems seen in the earlier ruling by its approach of keeping the crime to ‘pandering’ child pornography.

The earlier law, the Child Pornography Prevention Act, 1996, and the new one, the Protect Act, were attempts to find ways of handling the challenges that arise from the use of technology today. For instance, a prosecutor has to prove that the material that seems like child pornography actually used real children during its production.

The court has interpreted the 2003 ruling in the following way now – a person who supplies or shows an interest in supplying child pornography can be tried and prosecuted on two fronts: because he believes the material is a depiction of real children or for trying to convince a supposed recipient of the same.

The law now is applicable to any person ‘who knowingly advertises, promotes, presents, distributes, or solicits’ the material in question. However, there have been concerns about the scope of the law and also about over-enthusiastic prosecutors misusing/abusing it.