Yesterday the Senate Judiciary committee voted unanimously to approve a bill making it crime to possess “or access with intent to view” lewd depictions of children and/or those under the age of 16 engaged in sexual acts. We wrote about the bill this week in a story about efforts to strengthen Vermont’s child pornography statute.
S.19, sponsored by the Judiciary chair Sen. Dick Sears (D-Bennington), now heads the Senate floor, where it’s scheduled for a second reading today. “I don’t anticipate much problem with it,” Sears says.
The committee amended S.19 from its original version to remove one so-called “affirmative defense” that would enable those charged with the crime to escape prosecution. In Sears’ original bill, a defendant could claim that he or she possessed “fewer than three depictions” of child pornography but made a prompt and good-faith effort to destroy those images and didn’t share them with anyone but law enforcement.
But as Sears explained, setting a minimum number of allowable images was “problematic given new digital technology.” As he explained, a single, downloadable web page or digital file may contain 50 or more illegal images but still be interpreted by a judge or jury as a “single depiction.”
That said, the new child-porn bill will require prosecutors to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a defendant actually intended to view or download the illicit images. The revised bill also leaves in place a potential loophole for offenders: Consumers of child pornography could still store illegal files in their computer’s trash folder, then claim as a defense that they made a good-faith effort to delete those files but neglected to empty the trash.
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