Internet child-porn crackdown: Federal prosecutions soar

8-24-2008 National:

Just a few mouse clicks into the forbidden world of Internet child porn can transform an apparently upstanding individual into a federal prison inmate - doing a long sentence.

That's the harsh reality former KGO radio host Bernie Ward will encounter this week. The popular and prominent liberal voice on Bay Area radio for decades is scheduled to be sentenced Thursday in San Francisco federal court for distributing sexual images of young children. The best the 57-year-old Ward can hope for is five years in prison.

Setting aside his celebrity status, Ward's case is no aberration.

Ward is ensnared in what is becoming one of the U.S. Justice Department's fastest-growing areas of prosecution. Child-porn crimes have gone from a rarity on federal court dockets to a phenomenon, with prosecutions jumping nationally from a scant 30 in 1995 to more than 2,100 last year, according to a Mercury News analysis of Justice Department data maintained by Syracuse University.

In the Bay Area, dozens of federal cases are being filed every year and the U.S. Attorney's Office is on pace to file a record number of child-porn prosecutions in 2008. There were just two child-porn cases filed in the region's federal courts in 1995 - an era when child pornography just began to proliferate on the Web.

Aggressive law enforcement teams - nationally and in the Bay Area - are policing the Internet. Typically, they are catching successful people - engineers, businessmen,
professors and lawyers - who are under the false impression that their habit is personal, harmless and anonymous.

But by downloading or sharing sexual images of pre-pubescent children, those who do so find out they are not sequestered by the privacy of their own computers and are shocked when they suddenly find themselves facing the law's wrath.

"Almost without exception, I find these defendants to be honestly amazed at the seriousness of their conduct as far as the system is concerned," said Alan Baum, a Studio City defense attorney who specializes in child-porn cases.

For some of those caught by the legal system, the consequences and public humiliation have been too much to bear. In the Bay Area alone, five defendants facing child-porn charges have committed suicide over the past two years. This year, on the eve of a court appearance on child-porn charges in the spring, one of the defendants, Los Gatos businessman George Halldin was found dead in his car inside a burning warehouse. Authorities ruled it a suicide.

Court papers show the alarming trend prompted the U.S. Attorney's Office to push for child-porn defendants awaiting trial to be put on electronic monitoring or even kept in jail to prevent more suicides.

This as prosecutors, judges, defense lawyers and others expect the number of child-porn cases to continue to swell. San Francisco U.S. Attorney Joe Russoniello has made child-porn cases a priority, saying that catching people who favor such images is one way to stop potential pedophiles from doing worse.

The Justice Department generally has emphasized the child-porn crackdown, unveiling "Project Safe Childhood" two years ago and setting up a national child-exploitation unit that prosecuted Ward's case.

For the federal courts, child-porn cases are raising a host of issues, from concerns in the defense bar that prosecutors are casting too broad a net to questions about the severity of the prison sentences, which often carry mandatory minimum terms ordinarily reserved for violent felons in gun cases and major drug dealers.

"These cases are difficult," said San Jose U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel, who just this summer sent several child-porn defendants to prison. "Many of the defendants have no previous criminal history and have been productive members of the community, and often there are complex psychological reasons why (they) are interested in child pornography.

"At the same time," Fogel added, "the images themselves are truly horrible. Even passive viewers of such material help to make its production profitable."

On July 2, Christopher Burt Wiltsee's family and friends, including his wife, filed into Fogel's courtroom to show support as he faced sentencing for possessing child porn, found on his government computer at NASA/Ames Research Center in Mountain View. The case was a paradigm of child-porn prosecutions unfolding in courts across the country.

Under sentencing guidelines, Wiltsee, a 57-year-old Morgan Hill man, confronted as much as eight years in prison - and federal prosecutors were urging the judge to come down hard. "The practical effect of possessing child pornography is to stimulate the market in child pornography, which encourages things such as child torture and rape," Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Fazioli told Fogel.

But as in most of these cases, Wiltsee's defense pointed to his clean record and family support, depicting him as a depressed man who'd get drunk and download some child porn in the midst of hundreds of images that for the most part were adult pornography. An apologetic Wiltsee told the judge the child porn streamed into his computer with so many other images he did not always know what he was doing.

'I'm horrified by those images," he said, "and I didn't look at them or dwell on them very much."

Fogel, however, noted that some of the images of children being "essentially tortured" were "at the extreme end of the scale."

The judge sent Wiltsee away for five years in federal prison. In meting out the punishment, he said he was puzzled why someone like Wiltsee would want to download such images, calling it a "great mystery."

That mystery is at the heart of most child-porn possession cases. There is little agreement whether defendants like Wiltsee are predators-in-waiting, or merely troubled souls taking a peek into the dark underbelly of cyberspace. Even psychiatrists, now frequently being asked to evaluate defendants for sentencing, haven't reached a conclusive answer. In some cases, psychiatrists describe the conduct as "pathologically voyeuristic" instead of pedophilia.

'It's a big, big question," said Dr. Humberto Temporini, a psychiatry professor and expert on child-porn cases at the University of California-Davis. "What we know is very limited to a very skewed sample because these are just the guys who get caught."

Federal prosecutors insist there is a connection between downloading child porn and preying on children.

"As a prosecutor, I don't really need to know why," Russoniello said. "For every one of these people we take down, we're intervening in preventing child abuse."

Experts say there isn't much variance in the profiles of child-porn defendants. They tend to be middle-aged, educated white males with no criminal history and seldom a history of being sexually abused. They get caught in a variety of ways - child-abuse groups monitor the Web for child porn, reporting some to the FBI. Federal agents also conduct stings.

Ward was nabbed when he e-mailed child porn to an online dominatrix, who reported the image to local police in Oakdale.

Once caught, however, there isn't much of a defense. The computer hard drive is all federal prosecutors need to gain a conviction, and child-porn cases seldom reach trial. "The elements are very easy for the government to prove," said Orin Kerr, a George Washington University law professor.

In Ward's case, his lawyer, Doron Weinberg, argues the radio celebrity was downloading child porn and entering chat rooms as part of a journalism project to explore the issue. But Ward pleaded guilty in May to one count of distributing child porn, admitting he sent dozens of illicit images via e-mail, some of children as young as 3.

To defense lawyers, the case underscores an overarching problem: The government may be coming down too severely on those who view the material while the producers of it, many in foreign countries, elude law enforcement's grasp.

"There is nothing about prosecuting the Bernie Wards of the world that is going to stop the East European exploiters from marketing this stuff," said Weinberg, who believes his client should be facing six months of home detention. "And I'm going to be begging for five years."

But federal prosecutors are urging a San Francisco judge to lock the father of four up for nine years, calling his conduct "amoral" in court papers filed last week. And that type of punishment is warranted to those who fight child abuse.

"The bottom line is that possession of child pornography is a crime," said Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. "These are crime scene photos. Our hope is these prosecutions will be a deterrent and people will think twice about accessing this stuff." ..News Source.. by Howard Mintz