Work finally culinating a bit….
March 20, 2011
So, the draft I have been working on for the criminal justice section of the ABA has been finished. It will soon be submitted to entire delegation. Pretty darn exciting. A lot of my writing ended up into the proposal, as well as several pages of stats and ideas I found/created. Please no one hate me, for being part of the institution recommending that federal sentencing for child pornagraphers should be relaxed. Because really, the proposal isn’t for a relaxing of the guidelines, BUT a simple accord with justice and reason. It is ridiculous to enhance someones CP crime by 6 years because they used a computer. This runs counter to a variety of legal maxims as well as common sense. I doubt there are more than 10 people on earth who use anything but a computer for CP. There is no way that any legislative intent is being served by such an enhancement. Same thing with a variety of the enhancements, the majority of which punish and penalize actions which the criminal had no intent to commit.
If you don’t take my word for it, take the word of 80 percent of the judges out there who ignore the CP guidelines. This is compared with like 14 percent in other fields like violent crimes etc. It isn’t that we dont want CP criminal punished, we do. I do. But at the same time, the punishment needs to be congruent with the intent of the commissions etc. that decide what enhancements deserve additional jail time. We need to punish things transparantly, not say that we are stopping “selling” CP and then punish someone using a P2P program that automatically is hosting images.
