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February 13, 2015

Op-Ed: Senate Passes Highly Flawed Child Porn Restitution Bill

WASHINGTON, D.C.—In the wake of the U.S. Senate passing Sente Bill 295, dubbed the "Amy and Vicky Child Pornography Victim Restitution Improvement Act of 2015," we began musing at how a plaintiff's attorney in the upcoming mass of lawsuits that the law would generate, would sound in delivering his closing argument to the jury: "If it please Your Honor," the attorney would begin, "I'll admit that my client possessed two images of little Amy Unknown (as she's been dubbed) in sexually compromising positions, an act for which he was charged and sentenced to two years in federal prison, and ordered to pay the poor child the $3.4 million in restitution she's been awarded from the perpetrator of the heinous acts that my client had photos of—and to his credit, my client has emptied his bank accounts and sold his assets to come up with the nearly half a million dollars that he has given to the Court, which will forward that sum to Amy. "But now, we have another defendant in the dock who has been found to possess those same two pornographic photos of Amy, and under the Amy and Vicky Child Pornography Victim Restitution Improvement Act of 2015, since Amy has now collected the entire $3.4 million to which she is, by law, entitled, it is my client's right to be reimbursed for some part of the half-million dollars he has already paid to Amy from this defendant, as set forth in United States Code Section 2259 (3)(c)(5), which states, 'Each defendant who is ordered to pay restitution under paragraph (2)(A), and has made full payment to the victim equal to or exceeding the statutory minimum amount described in paragraph (2)(B), may recover contribution from any defendant who is also ordered to pay restitution under paragraph (2)(A). Such claims shall be brought in accordance with this section and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.'" Now try to imagine a jury made up of 12 upstanding, possibly church-going citizens going back to their jury room and debating just how much of the money that one child porn possessor paid to a child porn victim should be returned to him by another child porn possessor—and after you've stopped laughing, think about how stupid the 98 senators who voted to pass Senate Bill 295 have to be to expect any jury (or most federal judges, for that matter) to let a convicted kiddie porn user collect even one thin dime from another kiddie porn user. Mind you, the bill is in response to a Supreme Court decision handed down last April, where The Nine remanded the case of child porn possessor Doyle Paroline to the U.S. District Court judge who presided over the case to determine just how much of the $3.4 million that he had originally required Paroline to pay to Amy would be just compensation to her for Paroline's possession of just two images of her being molested. And as AVN previously reported, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), the Senate's chief anti-porn activist, made it his mission to reform Section 2259 so that it could not be interpreted, as several federal judges have, to allow a judge to require a child porn defendant to pay anything less than the full amount sought by the child porn victim, or if no figure has been determined, at least $250,000 if the defendant created the child porn in question, or $150,000 if he simply possessed it. "Through this legislation, we are telling future offenders that they will pay for these heinous crimes, and even more importantly, we are telling victims that help is on the way," Hatch said after the bill was passed. Hatch, it should be noted, has recently come under attack from the far right-wing elements of his party for not being conservative enough—but that same element is also virulently anti-porn, so it's possible that Hatch will use the passage of SB 295 to bolster his cred within his party—and we're also pretty sure that the other 97 senators who voted with him will use their votes to make equal hay among their constituencies. So perhaps the only real loser, if this bill becomes law, will be the cause of justice itself. The text of SB 295 can be found here.

 
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