KY- Child pornographer blogs from prison

11-3-2008 Kentucky:

Passing long days while he awaits sentencing for distributing child pornography, Timothy "Casey" Richards writes out his blog updates, the G-rated ones for FreeCasey.com and the X-rated ones for Gay Boy in Jail on Blogspot.

He uses his phone calls from the federal prison in Leitchfield, Ky., to dictate them to friends and supporters in Nashville and elsewhere. They patiently post his words online or record them for Podcasts.

On both blogs, Richards rants about being targeted by the government for being gay, a scapegoat in a national investigation that he says shouldn't have ever involved him.

FreeCasey.com includes a running count of his incarceration — 1,135 days today. Gay Boy in Jail includes graphic sexual fantasies and dreams.

And they're both perfectly legal, attorneys and First Amendment experts say, although warnings from Richards' attorney prompted his supporters to take down the X-rated blog Monday night. With sentencing set for Nov. 7, attorney Kim Hodde said, she doesn't want to take any chances. The prosecution already cited portions of the blog in a sentencing recommendation — one of them Richards' theory that a certain prison guard is secretly gay.

Nashville resident Richards, 27, was convicted in October 2006 on 11 charges stemming from distribution of child pornography and related charges. He faces a minimum of 15 years in prison.

He slipped into the business nearly a decade ago, as an 18-year-old involved with a 15-year-old boy. The two made sex videos and put them on the Web. It later gave Richards an idea — working with friends in other states to charge Web surfers to watch. Or in the federal government's vocabulary: conspiracy to distribute child pornography.

And the federal government eventually paid attention. Richards was caught up in a multistate prosecution prompted by a 2005 New York Times report that featured an underage Internet porn star.

In recent months, Richards' sole pornographic enterprise has been the free blog.

Inmates in state and federal prisons are not allowed access to the Internet, but many prisoners get their message out on the Web after they dictate over the phone to family and friends. A former prisoner hosts a site open only to the incarcerated and their helpers, PrisonBlogs.net, but prisoners can be hosted anywhere online.

Each prison has set times allowing inmates use of a telephone and to receive and send mail, and all communications in and out are monitored.

Inmates have rights
Being in prison doesn't take away Americans' rights to broadcast their views and opinions, as long as those don't threaten someone else's rights, said David Hudson, a Vanderbilt University law professor who works with the First Amendment Center in Nashville. That would include trying to contact those they've harmed.

Hudson wrote in an e-mail that it's not unusual for inmates to blog.

"Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote more than 20 years ago that prison walls don't separate inmates from the protections of the Constitution," Hudson wrote.

But Richards should be an exception, said Chris Sanders, president of Tennessee Equality Project, a statewide organization advocating for gay rights. Those convicted of cyber crime, including hate crimes, shouldn't be allowed to keep using the Internet to spread their message, he said.

Postings continue
The government sees Richards as an unrepentant detainee who continued to blog in light of his conviction, according to court records. Some of Richards' postings were attached as exhibits to a sentencing recommendation of 30 years written by Assistant U.S. Attorney Carrie Daughtrey.

"No law keeps him from writing something down and telling people who type it in," Daughtrey said. "It's been going on all along."

Through his father, Russ Richards, Timothy Richards declined to be interviewed.

Several hundred have visited the blogs, Russ Richards said. They were started as a way to drum up support for his son's cause and detail his side of the story. He said he supports his son wholeheartedly and has since that first teen love affair.

"It was a relationship sanctioned between both sets of parents," Russ Richards said. "Tim got caught in a very big political situation and they had to prosecute him."

From a young age, Timothy Richards was out spoken and had a knack for business, his father said.

"He is very articulate, very outgoing," Russ Richards said. "I did not condone or agree to his blogging. Nonetheless, he has a First Amendment right to voice his opinion." ..News Source.. by Chris Echegaray