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The Runaway Cartographer
Posted: Fri Oct 17, 2014 4:37 pm
by MajGenl.Meade
17 Oct 2014 The Times (South Africa)
Grisham’s sentence destruction
AMERICA is wrongly jailing far too many people for viewing child pornography, best-selling legal novelist John Grisham said in a wide-ranging attack on the US judicial system and the country's sky-high imprisonment rates.
Grisham, 59, argued that US judges had “gone crazy” over the past 30 years, locking up far too many people, from white-collar criminals like businesswoman Martha Stewart to black teens on minor drug charges and — he added — those who had viewed child porn online.
“We have prisons now filled with 60-year-old white men who’ve never harmed anybody, would never touch a child,” he said in an interview to promote his latest novel, Gray Mountain, published next week. “But they went online one night and started surfing around, probably had too much to drink or whatever, and pushed the wrong buttons, went too far and got into child porn.”
The author cited the case of a “good buddy from law school” who was caught up in a Canadian child porn sting operation a decade ago as an example of excessive sentencing.
“His drinking was out of control, and he went to a website. It was labelled ‘16-year-old wannabe hookers’ or something like that. So he went there, downloaded some stuff — it was 16-year-old girls who looked 30. He shouldn’t have done it. It was stupid, but it wasn’t 10-year-old boys. He didn’t touch anything. A week later there was a knock on the door: FBI. It was a sting set up by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to catch sex offenders, and he went to prison for three years......We’ve gone nuts with this incarceration.”
Daily Telegraph
Not boys? Well, that's all right then.
Re: The Runaway Cartographer
Posted: Fri Oct 17, 2014 11:02 pm
by BoSoxGal
Every time child pornography is viewed online, the victims are revictimized. Sure, the producers are the primary offenders, but the users should be punished, too.
Personally I don't care as much about the 16 year old who looks 18+, but in my work I've had to view child porn and it's something I'll never get out of my head - if he'd ever seen photos of an adult male raping a 6 year old girl, he'd think differently too, I bet.
Re: The Runaway Cartographer
Posted: Fri Oct 17, 2014 11:36 pm
by Long Run
And it is not the judges who are making real decision in these cases. They are following the law that often does not give them much leeway. He should stick to things he knows something about, whatever that is is a mystery.
Re: The Runaway Cartographer
Posted: Sat Oct 18, 2014 6:14 am
by Lord Jim
To me, the primary rationale for the strong punishment of people who view child pornography is the fact that it's the viewers who provide the financial incentive for the production. ("Production" in this case involving the raping of children.) People who view kiddie porn are in a sense facilitating child rape. (In the same sense that people who view "snuff" films are facilitating murder.)
That being said, if the facts are as presented in the article in this specific case, then one can certainly ask whether three years in prison is an intelligent use of incarceration resources.
Re: The Runaway Cartographer
Posted: Sat Oct 18, 2014 6:32 am
by BoSoxGal
I'm having a hard time cutting/pasting from the Web (on my iPhone) but I just read an article quoting the lawyer in question as disagreeing with Grisham and saying he believes his sentence (he's out now, readmitted to the Bar and practicing law again) was fair for the crime he committed.
Article was in the Daily Mail, so who knows?