Cyber Crime Lawyer Blog

As a Miami sex offender registration defense attorney, I was extremely interested to read that the city is taking steps to destroy its most notorious homeless encampment. According to a March 6 article from the Miami Herald, city work crews destroyed the encampment next to the Intracoastal Waterway that had housed as many as 100 homeless registered sex offenders. Many ended up there after sex offender residency restrictions made it difficult for them to live with relatives. But the camp caused a public outcry after it was discovered that law enforcement was actually sending offenders there if they had no place to go after release.

Mario Vasquez says this happened to him. The 24-year-old says Miami-Dade police ordered him to move under the bridge after his release from prison four years ago. He served two years for having consensual sex with his 14-year-old girlfriend when he was 18. State lobbyist Ron Book, who has been fighting to break up the sex offender camp, said he would work with county authorities to find another place for Vasquez or send him back to his native Dominican Republic. Book heads the county’s Homeless Trust and has helped many of the offenders find other housing. He also helped pass the original sex offender residency laws, which he still supports, although he said he never intended to create police-ordered homeless encampments.

The Miami Herald had video of the camp’s dismantling:

A former resident of the camp named Patrick told the newspaper that there will be another such camp, even if it’s not under this particular bridge. As a Fort Lauderdale sex offender registration defense lawyer, I am concerned that Patrick may be right. Even when police don’t outright tell offenders to live under a bridge, the harsh restrictions keep them from living in almost any populated area. Without family or friends to fall back on, and with no job waiting when they get out of prison, they may have no way to avoid homelessness. This is bad for the offenders’ basic needs and rights, of course, and it makes it harder for them to get jobs and return to society. But it’s also a problem for law enforcement, because homeless offenders are harder to keep track of -- undermining the original purpose of the registration laws.

As a West Palm Beach sex offender residency criminal defense lawyer, I don’t know of any other crime that is treated as harshly as sex offenses. After other kinds of offenders have done their time and served probation, they only have limited restrictions on their rights and obligations to disclose their pasts. This includes people convicted of serious and violent, but non-sexual, crimes. As the article points out, Miami-Dade County has already taken steps to open more areas to residency by offenders, and other counties (or the Florida Legislature) may follow. But if legislators don’t have the courage to open up residency laws for offenders who merit lighter treatment -- or even distinguish between types of offenders -- Patrick’s prediction is likely to come true.

As a Miami sex offender registration defense attorney, I was extremely interested to read that the city is taking steps to destroy its most notorious homeless encampment. According to a March 6 article from the Miami Herald, city work crews destroyed the encampment next to the Intracoastal Waterway that had housed as many as 100 homeless registered sex offenders. Many ended up there after sex offender residency restrictions made it difficult for them to live with relatives. But the camp caused a public outcry after it was discovered that law enforcement was actually sending offenders there if they had no place to go after release.

Mario Vasquez says this happened to him. The 24-year-old says Miami-Dade police ordered him to move under the bridge after his release from prison four years ago. He served two years for having consensual sex with his 14-year-old girlfriend when he was 18. State lobbyist Ron Book, who has been fighting to break up the sex offender camp, said he would work with county authorities to find another place for Vasquez or send him back to his native Dominican Republic. Book heads the county’s Homeless Trust and has helped many of the offenders find other housing. He also helped pass the original sex offender residency laws, which he still supports, although he said he never intended to create police-ordered homeless encampments.

The Miami Herald had video of the camp’s dismantling:

A former resident of the camp named Patrick told the newspaper that there will be another such camp, even if it’s not under this particular bridge. As a Fort Lauderdale sex offender registration defense lawyer, I am concerned that Patrick may be right. Even when police don’t outright tell offenders to live under a bridge, the harsh restrictions keep them from living in almost any populated area. Without family or friends to fall back on, and with no job waiting when they get out of prison, they may have no way to avoid homelessness. This is bad for the offenders’ basic needs and rights, of course, and it makes it harder for them to get jobs and return to society. But it’s also a problem for law enforcement, because homeless offenders are harder to keep track of -- undermining the original purpose of the registration laws.

As a West Palm Beach sex offender residency criminal defense lawyer, I don’t know of any other crime that is treated as harshly as sex offenses. After other kinds of offenders have done their time and served probation, they only have limited restrictions on their rights and obligations to disclose their pasts. This includes people convicted of serious and violent, but non-sexual, crimes. As the article points out, Miami-Dade County has already taken steps to open more areas to residency by offenders, and other counties (or the Florida Legislature) may follow. But if legislators don’t have the courage to open up residency laws for offenders who merit lighter treatment -- or even distinguish between types of offenders -- Patrick’s prediction is likely to come true.

One federal law important in my work as a Fort Lauderdale cyber crime criminal defense attorney is the Communications Decency Act. As you might guess from the name, this is a federal law aimed at regulating online pornography, passed during the Clinton Administration. However, a provision not specifically aimed at pornography has become important for other reasons. Section 230 of the Act shields ISPs from lawsuits brought because of communications by users of their systems. That is, this law makes a provider like a cable company immune from a lawsuit over online speech by one of its users, as long as the provider didn’t provide or modify the speech. It does not apply to copyright violations, although the Digital Millennium Copyright Act also provides some immunity.

This law was on my mind last week when I read an article about an Italian court case against three executives at Google. According to a Feb. 25 article in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Googlers -- a chief legal officer, global privacy counsel and retired CFO -- were essentially accused of not removing an offensive video from their servers fast enough. The video in question shows an autistic boy being beaten and taunted by bullies at his school. It was on Google Video for two months before Italian police notified Google Italy about it; the company pulled it about two hours after notification. Nonetheless, the boy’s father and an advocacy group for people with Down syndrome complained, and the executives were prosecuted. They were convicted in Italy of violating that country’s privacy laws and given six-month suspended sentences.

The ruling was swiftly condemned in the United States, by private businesses and even nonprofits like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is often on the other side of privacy debates. The EFF’s Danny O’Brien said the ruling suggested that any business or individual with a global reach could be imprisoned overseas for other people’s acts. This gives Google and similar “intermediaries” an obligation to screen all of their content for speech that violates any country’s laws before putting it online, he said. And that essentially takes away everyone’s tools for speaking freely on the Internet. Others in the article pointed out that the convicted Google executives were not involved in any of the decisions made about the video, and that nothing Google did was illegal in the United States.

As a West Palm Beach cyber crime criminal defense lawyer, I agree that this is a troubling precedent for every Internet user. Different nations have widely different ideas about what’s acceptable online content. For example, China censors search engine results that make its government look bad; pornography is illegal in Saudi Arabia. Foreign laws like these are broken every minute in other countries. If the precedent set by the Italian ruling is adopted everywhere, that means ISPs and hosting sites are almost certainly liable for prosecution in other countries. And that could leave companies big and small with no choice but to filter their content very carefully, limiting what you and I can actually say in our own country.

Of course, the rulings would still have to be enforced. In this case, the Google executives’ sentences were suspended, so there’s no serious risk of jail time. But even if they were, Italy would need the executives to voluntarily come to Italy or a U.S. court to extradite them in order to put them in prison. And as a Miami cyber crime criminal defense attorney, I can promise that extradition would be an uphill battle in any American court, because the accusation must be a crime in both countries. However, this doesn’t mean the Italian ruling is harmless or a good idea, for businesses around the world or for Internet speech.

A Philadelphia-area school district made news last week when a student accused it of spying on him through an undisclosed software package in his loaner computer. As a Fort Lauderdale cyber crime criminal defense attorney, I was very interested in the story of the Robbins family’s lawsuit against the Lower Merion School District. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported Feb. 20 that federal and local prosecutors are investigating the school district for possible violations of wiretap and privacy laws, as well as students’ constitutional right to be free of unreasonable search and seizures. The district is accused of spying on students through webcams built into school-issued laptops the students were allowed to take home.

The district loans laptops to most of its 2,300 high school students, who are free to take them home, the article said. However, it never told them or their parents that it was able to use a software package to remotely take snapshots of laptop users. The school district says this is used only when the computer is reported missing or stolen, and that it’s recovered only 18 out of 42 missing laptops this way. However, the practice came to light after someone from the district took a picture of student Blake Robbins, 15, who says his laptop was never reported missing before officials took a picture of him working on the computer at home. In the picture, he says he is eating Mike & Ike candies, which resemble large pills. On that basis, Harriton High School’s assistant principal accused Robbins of using drugs. The Robbins family is now suing the district.

This has turned into a major public relations mess for the school district, with the FBI joining the criminal investigation and the software maker issuing an update that disables the remote picture-taking feature. As a Miami-Dade cyber crime criminal defense lawyer, I think Robbins would have had a very strong defense if he had been prosecuted or penalized for the alleged drug-taking. The Fourth Amendment gives us the right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures. That right is somewhat limited for minors who are at school -- but not when they’re at home. That means simply telling students about the cameras is not enough. The school district should have a warrant to search students through the webcams, or at least a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing. If the Robbins family is right, they had neither in at least one case. And that means the evidence they had, even if did show drugs, would be hopelessly tainted and inadmissible in court.

The concept of unreasonable search and seizure is as old as the Constitution -- which is to say, more than two centuries old and still going strong. School district attorneys and law enforcement know very well what constitutes an unreasonable search of a minor, or an adult, in the physical world. Very few people would assume that it’s legal to come to a student’s home and take pictures through a bedroom window -- but as this article shows, the school district had no problem doing the same thing with more sophisticated tools. Technology gives us new ways to interact socially, and sometimes, that new context makes authorities forget that the old rules still apply. When they do, it’s my job as a West Palm Beach cyber crime criminal defense attorney to fight back on behalf of individuals’ rights.

I am proud to announce that my firm, Balliro Seltzer LLC, is sponsoring radio station 93 Rock's Best Damn Brew Review event -- happening this Friday, Feb. 26 at 8 p.m. This is the station's outdoor beer garden and concert, featuring 200 beers and a concert stage with local South Florida bands Ghost of Gloria, Venejer and Streetkind. Along with First Class Transportation, we are sponsoring the Safe Ride Home program, which offers rides home to participants who don't feel safe to drive. Our Miami DUI defense attorneys know firsthand how costly a drunk driving charge can be, in lives and money, and we want everyone to have fun and arrive home safely.

Here's the radio promo for the event, which mentions us as a sponsor. For more information, you can check out the BDBR page at 93rock.com.

In 2006, the cycling world endured a small scandal when that year’s Tour de France winner, American Floyd Landis, was stripped of his title for doping. This week, that case is getting resurrected in a way that interests me as a West Palm Beach cyber crime criminal defense attorney. The Los Angeles Times reported Feb. 16 that French authorities now believe Landis or someone connected to him hacked into the computer system of the laboratory handling his doping test. A French judge has issued an arrest warrant for Landis, which would call him in for questioning about the September 2006 incident. The same judge also issued a warrant for Arnie Baker, a coach and advisor to Landis whose computer French authorities believe was used in the alleged hacking.

French authorities accuse Landis or his associate of breaking into computers for the Agence Francais de Lutte contre le Dopage, or AFLD. That laboratory was retained by the Tour de France to test participants and found synthetic testosterone in Landis during the 2006 race, leading authorities to take away his title and ban him from cycling for two years. Landis unsuccessfully appealed that decision, arguing that the lab made mistakes and was biased. The September 2006 hacking incident took place at the same time Landis was defending himself from the initial charges. Specifically, the newspaper said, French authorities have found evidence tying the hacking to an email address belonging to Baker. Neither Landis nor Baker can actually be arrested unless they travel to France.

A computer expert interviewed by the Times said it was unusual to see hacking against an organization with the extensive logs AFLD is apparently claiming. He suggested that a third party with authorization to enter the system may be responsible. This is just one of the avenues I would explore, as a Miami-Dade cyber crime defense lawyer. Expert hackers know how to cover their tracks, which is one reason why I’d want to verify that the email address connected to Baker was genuine and not “spoofed,” and that any connection to his computer is genuine. And like the expert above, I’d also want to look for an “insider” who could get the information in question without breaching the lab’s security.

Landis and his fight against the doping charges would have been in the news at the time of the breach. This could easily have made them a tempting target for hackers looking to misdirect investigators. As a Fort Lauderdale hacking criminal defense attorney, I would start my defense of a client like Landis with a thorough computer forensic investigation. Because technology has advanced so quickly in the past two decades, lawmakers and prosecutors can’t always tell when the electronic record of a crime has been “spoofed” or otherwise falsified. As a former cyber crime prosecutor, I handled multiple cases where details mattered -- sometimes details as small as the time on the computer’s internal clock. These details can make or break your case, determining your freedom and your reputation for years to come.

As a Fort Lauderdale child pornography possession defense attorney, I wrote last year about a Connecticut court’s decision to award financial restitution to a young woman who had been a child victim of child pornographers. This is an established practice in prosecutions of the people who make the child pornography. However, the Connecticut case was the first that I had heard of in which a court ordered restitution from a defendant who was accused of downloading and distributing the objectionable materials, and had no contact at all with the young woman. At the time, the Connecticut Law Tribune reported that the case may have set a precedent for similar restitution orders.

That may have come true, at least according to a Feb. 8 article from the Associated Press. That article noted the Connecticut ruling, but said hundreds more requests for restitution have been filed nationwide since then. Many, but not all, of them are from the same young woman involved in the Connecticut case, identified here as Amy. Amy was eight or nine when her uncle abused her and took pictures. He’s in prison now, but the pictures are widely available online. Amy and other victims claim in court papers that they’re re-victimized every time a new person downloads one of “their” pictures. They find out about the prosecutions through the National Crime Victim Rights Center, which was created by federal law to notify victims about criminal trials. Amy’s attorney said he requests $3.4 million in each case, but doesn’t expect to receive nearly that much.

According to the AP, courts have been mixed in their response to these requests. Some have denied restitution, but at least two courts in Florida have awarded restitution of more than $3.2 million. Several others have awarded much smaller amounts, as symbolic penalties or because defendants have a limited ability to pay. In one Minnesota case, the judge asked prosecutors why they didn’t request restitution for Amy. Restitution cases are on appeal, but the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the federal appeals court for Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, has already ruled on the practice. That court said restitution can be denied if the prosecution can’t show how much harm the defendant caused, but that ruling included a sharp dissent.

As a South Florida child pornography possession criminal defense attorney, I think the requests for restitution are understandable, but legally weak. Under the law, restitution can be ordered only for exploitation of a child. Victims claiming restitution say they are exploited with each new download, but they can mean it only in the abstract, because a download is an act that happens without harming them, and in fact without their involvement. Furthermore, the goal of restitution is to keep criminals from making a financial profit from wrongful acts. Profit is a clear part of the crime of making child pornography, but it’s hard to show a financial profit from mere possession. Thus, I believe the restitution requests are inappropriate in child pornography possession cases.

At least one expert in the article suggested that restitution requests for child pornography victims belong in the civil courts -- that is, victims should sue rather than request money through a criminal case. This may be a sensible compromise, because civil courts are better suited to work out the complicated question of when child pornography exploits a child. In a criminal case, the court’s job is to determine whether the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt -- not to determine financial payments. But whether such cases are moved to the civil courts is ultimately up to the federal appeals courts, and probably the U.S. Supreme Court. As a Miami-Dade child pornography possession defense attorney, I hope those courts think seriously about the purpose of the restitution law and the difficulties of clarifying it in criminal courts.

As a Miami cyber crime criminal defense attorney, I was paying attention in 2003 when Pete Townshend, guitarist for legendary rock band The Who and a British citizen, was detained in that country for looking at child pornography. Townshend told British police that he had paid for access to a child pornography site to research his own autobiography and a campaign against child pornography. He was never charged with a crime, but British law enforcement put him on their sex offender registry for five years. That five-year period is now over, but at least one Florida group that opposes child pornography isn’t satisfied. ABC News reported Jan. 29 that Protect Our Children, a nonprofit from Brevard County, has mailed hundreds of postcards in Miami Gardens and around SunLife Stadium, warning nearby families that Townshend will be in the area Feb. 7.

The postcards, in English and Spanish, say Townshend will be “at large” in Miami when his band performs at the halftime show of Super Bowl XLIV. They say only that he was registered as a sex offender at home “for an offense related to child pornography.” According to ABC, Protect Our Children and another group, Child AbuseWatch, protested the NFL’s choice of The Who as Super Bowl halftime performers because of Townshend’s past conviction. The NFL told ABC that Child AbuseWatch was the only protester to write to the network, and that it had no qualms about the appropriateness of The Who’s performance. Similarly, NBC Miami reported Jan. 28 that Protect Our Children was unsuccessful in its attempts to convince the federal government to keep Townshend out of the country.

Regardless of whether Townshend deserved to be on the sex offender list, it seems to me that the anti-child-abuse groups are focusing their attention on the wrong target. For one thing, as a West Palm Beach cyber crime criminal defense lawyer, I know Florida law does not consider Townshend a sex offender for registration or residency purposes, because his time on the sex offender registry has expired. For another, Townshend got in trouble for looking at child pornography, not for molesting children. While looking at child pornography is correctly condemned for creating demand for the materials, it’s not the same crime. And unfortunately, statistics show that the vast majority of adults who abuse children sexually are family members or other trusted adults -- not random strangers children meet on the street.

The stated motivation behind the Townshend postcards -- protecting children -- is worthy. But as a Fort Lauderdale cyber crime criminal defense attorney, I wonder whether the reaction is completely reasonable. Townshend has served his time on a sex offender registry and undergone an extensive investigation by Scotland Yard, which declined to charge him with a crime. His home country seems to believe he is no longer a threat, and the evidence that he ever was a threat is weak. It’s easy to target celebrities whose legal trouble has attracted lots of media attention, but much harder to find information on the everyday people who may commit far more serious crimes. Targeting people like Townshend may help anti-child-molestation groups drum up a lot of media coverage, but it punishes them further without doing much to actually protect children.

Because I am a Miami sex offender registration defense attorney, I have kept an eye on the local scandal involving sex offenders who live under the Julia Tuttle Causeway Bridge. The colony made the news a few years ago when it came out that sex offenders faced residency restrictions so severe that they actually couldn’t find anyplace else in the county where they could legally live. In fact, an investigation by New Times Miami found that the Florida Department of Corrections was ordering recently released inmates to live there, and some even have the address on their driver’s license. According to a Jan. 21 article in the Miami Herald, Miami-Dade County Commissioners have finally taken steps to address the problem by making new rules about residency.

The county’s new law is intended to stop confusion about the patchwork of city ordinances by superseding them. Under the new law, offenders still may not live within 2500 feet of schools. However, it also adopts the state’s lighter 1,000-foot residency restriction for all other places where children congregate, such as parks and day-care centers. This lifts harsher restrictions on those areas imposed by many cities. The county also added a 300-foot “child safety zone” in those areas, in which sex offenders may not loiter. The hope is that this will create more areas where offenders can find indoor housing. The ACLU of Florida, which has sued the city over the Tuttle Bridge colony in the past, said the new law was a step in the right direction, but still a half measure that doesn’t fully address the problem.

I agree. The easing of the 2500-foot restriction in many cities may help open up more housing, and that’s a good thing. But the new law leaves residency restrictions intact, and even adds a no-loitering restriction, despite no evidence that residency restrictions work. Police and Fort Lauderdale sex offender registration criminal defense lawyers like me know that most child sex crimes are perpetrated by someone the victim knows; that around half of perpetrators are relatives; and that the vast majority had never been arrested for anything before the molestation began. Furthermore, virtually forcing sex offenders to be homeless makes police’s job harder by making it harder to find those offenders.

Practical arguments aside, sex offender residency requirements also create a legal and ethical problem by re-penalizing people who have already done their time. This is against the spirit of our justice system, though perhaps not the letter, and creates real obstacles for ex-offenders who are trying to move on. Under the onus of sex offender residency and registration requirements, offenders have a hard time getting an address, getting a job and building law-abiding lives. And as far as I know, our society does not impose this kind of post-prison penalty for any other crime. As a West Palm Beach sex offender residency defense attorney, I wonder if the real motivation behind these laws is vengeance rather than protection of children.

Though my work as a Miami cyber crime criminal defense attorney, I’ve encountered numerous cases involving “sexting.” In far too many of these cases, prosecutors and school officials overreact and teenagers end up criminally charged with producing and sending child pornography, even in cases where they photographed themselves and were never in danger of exploitation. Now, according to the National Law Journal, the first sexting case has hit a federal appeals court. The Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is considering whether prosecutors can bring child pornography charges against three teenagers whose pictures were found by school authorities in a “sexting” bust.

The case involves two pictures. One was of two girls, 12 at the time, who were photographed wearing training bras. The other was of a 16-year-old coming out of the shower topless, with a towel wrapped around her waist. They were among 16 kids who faced child pornography charges when their mid-Pennsylvania school district uncovered widespread sexting in 2008. The district attorney said he would file child pornography charges against them if they didn’t take a class about avoiding sexual predators, then write an essay about why sexting was wrong. Most of the students agreed, but the three plaintiffs did not. In their federal lawsuit, Miller v. Skumanick, the three girls argued that the photos were not child pornography, which makes them protected speech under the First Amendment and not appropriate for prosecution.

Before the Third Circuit, the girls’ attorney, Witold Walczak of the ACLU, argued that the photos were far too tame to be considered pornography. That meant the prosecutor lacked probable cause to charge them. He also argued that child pornography laws were not meant to apply to teenagers who photograph themselves. The attorney representing the district attorney argued that the law was intended to protect kids from their own bad decisions, and from sexual predators attracted to naked pictures. The NLJ reported that the Third Circuit gave that argument a tough reception, with one judge suggesting that the class was “a particular government official’s views of what it means to be a girl in today’s society[.]”

As a Fort Lauderdale child pornography possession defense lawyer, I hope the Third Circuit’s ruling sets a precedent for sensible behavior by prosecutors and school officials. It is not a good idea for teenagers to send each other naked pictures, but criminal prosecution takes that bad situation and makes it much worse. As the ACLU attorney pointed out, child pornography laws are intended to protect kids from adults who exploit them. That concern doesn’t apply to pictures kids take voluntarily, especially self-portraits or pictures taken by peer group members. Prosecuting them for this behavior doesn’t protect them so much as it produces lifelong negative consequences for a youthful mistake.

This is not idle speculation. As a South Florida child pornography possession criminal defense attorney, I have written on this blog several times about kids who face prison time and sex offender status for sexting. They include a young man here in Florida who was kicked out of college and has trouble finding work because of a child pornography conviction related to sexting. I hope the Pennsylvania case paves the way for jurisdictions around the country to take a less life-altering approach.

As a Miami cybercrime criminal defense lawyer, I frequently defend people who are charge with possession of child pornography. In most cases, the evidence against my clients comes from images law enforcement found stored in special folders on their computers, or sometimes on other electronic devices or in their homes. However, every now and then, a defendant comes along who is accused of possessing images stored only in a “temp” or “cache” folder, where recently viewed files are stored until they are purged some time later. This is despite the fact that Florida and federal child pornography statutes require that the defendant “knowingly” possess the material. Can this type of unintentional “possession” be considered a crime?

On the federal level, the answer seems to be yes. At least three federal appeals courts have addressed the issue. In United States v. Romm, 455 F.3d 990 (9th Cir. 2006) and United States v. Bass, 411 F.3d 1198 (10th Cir. 2005), the Ninth and Tenth Circuits both ruled that defendants’ knowledge that the temporary cache existed, and attempts to erase the temporary files, was enough to show “knowing” possession. The Eleventh Circuit, which does include Florida, has indicated that it agrees. In United States v. Kain, No. 08-3396 (11th Cir. 2009), the court arguably took it even further. It wrote, “A computer user who intentionally accesses child pornography images on a web site gains actual control over the images, just as a person who intentionally browses child pornography in a print magazine ‘knowingly possesses’ those images, even if he later puts the magazine down without purchasing it.”

In Florida state courts, the answer may not be as clear. In a 2006 case, Strouse v. State WL 436028 (4th DCA, 2006), the Fourth District Court of Appeal found that merely viewing child pornography is not enough to establish knowing possession of the images, even if the images are cached in a temporary folder. However, it said, when defendants try to delete or manipulate the files, this can help prove knowing possession. After that ruling, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement cautioned its officers against basing an entire case on temporary files. However, officers finding temporary files are unlikely to stop looking for stronger evidence elsewhere on the computer.

This state of affairs creates a sticky situation for Floridians whose computers may have been used to view child pornography, or may have been compromised by a virus. Unfortunately, even though our legal system promises that every defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty, the reality is that child pornography possession defendants need a good Fort Lauderdale child pornography criminal defense attorney, as quickly as possible. In Florida state courts, defendants may be able to challenge cases based only on the existence temporary files that the defendant has not tried to manipulate. But in federal courts, district judges following the Eleventh Circuit’s instruction would be forced to treat mere viewing of files as possession, even though the user may have arrived at the site by accident and left quickly. Fortunately, as an experienced West Palm Beach child pornography possession attorney I can often find other avenues of defense for clients.

As a Fort Lauderdale child pornography criminal defense attorney, I was interested to see what may be the first large child pornography arrest in Florida of 2010. According to a Jan. 4 article in the Orlando Sentinel, Lake County authorities arrested a Walt Disney World employee Dec. 24 for possession of child pornography. James Treanor, 32, was charged with 200 counts of the crime, for possessing more than 5,000 images and 75 movies involving minors in sexual situations, many of whom reportedly appeared to be under the age of 12. Treanor told authorities that he had more, but deleted it because a friend planned to stay with him over the holidays. He is jailed with bail set at $10,000 per felony violation, which could be as much as $2 million if all of the counts are felony counts.

The newspaper said Treanor had a public defender, although that person was not reached before the article was published. I hope this attorney is prepared for a battle, because Treanor is facing serious penalties if this article is correct. Each image in the defendant’s possession can create a separate criminal count, which is likely why Treanor is charged with 200 separate counts of child pornography possession. Each of these carries up to five years in prison, which means he could be sentenced to as much as 1,000 years in prison -- effectively a life sentence. Judges have some discretion in sentencing, but public opinion is not kind to people accused of this crime. This may be especially true because he worked at Disney World, and presumably had contact with children.

One of the most difficult parts of my job as a West Palm Beach child pornography possession lawyer is to fight a premature conviction in “the court of public opinion.” Long before they get to a court of law, clients who are accused of child pornography possession and related crimes face serious, sometimes permanent consequences in other parts of their lives. This can include separation from a spouse, the loss of a job, loss of friendships and even physical attacks or intimidation. Even if the client is later found not guilty, it’s generally too late to reverse most of this damage. These attitudes can also bleed into the officially neutral justice system, which is why judges frequently have no flexibility in sentencing; defendants face lifelong sex-offender registration and residency requirements; and jurors and investigators can sometimes be prejudiced.

Of course, some people accused of child pornography possession are guilty. The goal of our justice system is to determine who is guilty and who is not, and even those accused of unsavory crimes are entitled to a fair trial. Another part of my job as a Miami child pornography possession criminal defense lawyer is to ensure that my clients get that fair trial, as far as that is possible. In some cases, that means excluding people or evidence that could prejudice the jury; in other cases, it means a full computer forensic search to find evidence that might exonerate my client entirely. Even when the system produces borderline absurd results, like a 1,000-year maximum sentence, I will fight to get my clients the fairest possible day in court.