On Wed, 15 Aug 2001, Jim Choate wrote:
The desire to get the 'speech' is what drives the act. To address one and ignore the other is simply not reasonable. The images should be taken as evidence of the act and then destroyed. They should not in and of themselves be left in circulation to promote further acts.
Your assumption here is that leaving them in circulation will promote further acts against children. I do not believe that this is the case. In fact, if anything promotes further acts against children, it is taking such images *out* of circulation. If the desire to get the 'speech' (ie, photos) is what drives the abuse of children, do we not owe it to those children to minimize the motive to harm them? And if the motive is financial, how better to minimize it than to flood the market with public-domain computer- generated kiddie porn? If you saturate the market, then there is no more financial motive to abuse kids. It's plain old supply and demand, right? It's totally obvious to anyone whose motive is actually protecting kids rather than suppressing speech. Which would explain why the american legal system has been missing it so consistently; protecting kids, whatever the rhetoric they use, is not what they want to do. Bear