Supreme Court Upholds Child Pornography Law

The Supreme Court on Monday upheld the latest Congressional effort to curb the spread of child pornography on the Internet, a 2003 law that makes it a crime to offer or solicit sexually explicit images of children. The law, known as the Protect Act, applies regardless of whether the material turns out to consist solely of computer-generated images, or digitally altered photographs of adults, or even if the offer is fraudulent and the material does not exist at all. “Offers to provide or requests to obtain child pornography are categorically excluded from the First Amendment,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the 7-to-2 majority. The law at issue was a response to a Supreme Court ruling in 2002, a decision that found unconstitutional an earlier law that prohibited simple possession of purported child pornography even if the material turned out not to depict real children. The First Amendment was violated by a law that “prohibits the visual depiction of an idea,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said in the 2002 decision. Justice Scalia said on Monday that by limiting the crime to the “pandering” of child pornography, the new law represented “a carefully crafted attempt to eliminate the First Amendment problems we identified” in the earlier decision.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/washington/20scotus.html?ref=todayspaper
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