Former Idaho Schoolteacher Steven Kutzner Receives Sentence

Jacob Sullum at Reason has the best initial write-up on news that former Idaho Middle School teacher Steven Kutzner was sentenced on Tuesday to 15 months in federal prison and three years of follow-up supervision based on possessing obscene visual representations of the sexual abuse of children. Kutzner pleaded guilty in October. Kutzner's case is best known because the images for which he was arrested and charged featured characters from the animated show The Simpsons -- the fact that he also had other images featuring real-life young people that may or may not have been underage was ruled relevant to sentencing. He could have received a maximum sentence of 10 years. The sentenced man took the deal in part to avoid the minimum five-year sentence that might have come with a charge of receiving such images.

This is extremely discouraging news and slightly baffling to me. I bet I know maybe 200 people on my Facebook friends list that own the satirical Robert Crumb story "Joe Blow," a story that seems to me could be determined as actionable pornography under these same laws. Heck, as I write this I'm twenty feet away from a DVD of the first season of the British television show Shameless, which also seems to me to depict people younger than 18 engaged in sexual acts as befits its dramatic purview. This sentencing just seems awful to me, someone put in a jail for a violation in proximity to another violation, the original violation the idea of something rather than the thing itself.
 
posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink
 

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