An 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel has unanimously struck down part of a federal law prohibiting the offering or advertising of material presented as child pornography, saying the provisions were too broad and vague.
The section that the court struck on Thursday had expanded child pornography to include images that were not necessarily sexual images of children but either were innocuous images of children or digitally altered images of adults to make them look like children.
The court rendered Section 2252A(a)(3)(B) of the PROTECT Act of 2003 unenforceable in the 11th Circuit, which covers Florida, Georgia and Alabama.
The case is U.S. v. Michael Williams, 04-15128, 11th Circuit.
No other circuit court has ruled on the issue.
In the 1980s, Congress expanded the definition of child pornography to include nonobscene but sexually suggestive images, and it outlawed the use of computers to distribute or receive such materials. In 1996, it passed the Child Pornography Prevention Act, which expanded the definition of child pornography again to include"any material or purported material in a manner that reflects the belief, or that is intended to cause another to believe" that the material contains illegal child pornography. This was the so-called pandering provision.
The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the pandering provisions as unconstitutionally overbroad in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition in 2002. The next year, Congress passed the PROTECT Act of 2003, which tweaks the language rejected by the justices.
|