Quote:
Originally posted by arg
The point the judge is making is not that it's okay to view or posess child porn, but that in this specific case, the lack of evidence of interstate transmission of the CP means it should not be a federal crime.
The US constitution's most basic limit on federal criminal jurisdiction is that the crime must involve interstate commerce...if it doesn't, states have jursdiction. The definition of "interstate commerce" is often stretched to make federal cases, like if you use a phone or the Internet in a crime it can be federal because the phone/internet connections *could* cross state boundaries. Drug offenses are even more tenuously considered defacto interstate commerce.
But the judge here is saying, you've got computer discs with child porn on them. There's no evidence how the porn got on them, so there's no evidence that it involved interstate commerce. The CP could have been produced and copied to the discs within the state. Thus it's not a federal crime. The physical discs were manufactured outside the state, but the source of the *data* on the discs wasn't known, and the origin of the discs wasn't sufficient to sway the judge.
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That's a good explaination.