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Thread: Child-Porn Expert Witness Accused of Child-Porn

  1. #1

    Default Child-Porn Expert Witness Accused of Child-Porn

    Parents Sue Expert Witness Who Made Fake Child-Porn of Their Kids

    An Ohio lawyer who serves as an expert witness in child pornography cases might be on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars in civil damages for Photoshopping courtroom exhibits of children having sex.

    Attorney Dean Boland purchased innocent pictures of four juvenile girls from a Canadian stock-image website, and then digitally modified them to make it appear as if the children were engaged in sexual conduct. Boland was an expert witness for the defense in half-a-dozen child porn cases, and he made the mock-ups to punctuate his argument that child pornography laws are unconstitutionally overbroad because they could be applied to faked photos.

    In 2007, the tactic made Boland the defendant of a deferred federal child-porn prosecution in Ohio even though his exhibits helped clear at least one client of child-porn-related allegations. Now, a federal appeals court decision (.pdf) is reinstating a civil lawsuit by the parents of two of the girls, potentially putting Boland on the hook for a minimum $300,000 plus legal costs.

    Boland, a former state prosecutor, had argued he was immune from such a lawsuit because, among other reasons, he’d created the images for use in court. That argument had already failed in his own criminal case, and was no more successful with the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

    “[N]o constitutional principle … allows a criminal defendant to defend one criminal charge by urging his lawyer or witness to commit another,” wrote the three-judge panel, in an unanimous ruling Wednesday. “Otherwise, an individual on trial for a murder-by-stabbing charge could try to prove that the knife was not long enough to kill someone by using it to stab someone else in the middle of the trial.”

    Boland said in a telephone interview Thursday, “I was hired as an expert witness. This was not like, let’s start a website of this crap.”

    Wednesday’s ruling reverses a lower court’s dismissal of the civil lawsuit (.pdf) that the parents lodged against Boland in 2007. Under the 1986 Child Abuse Victims’ Rights Act, each victim is entitled to a minimum $150,000 in damages if Borland loses at trial.

    “This is a complete scam,” Boland said.

    Boland said the avalanche of legal trouble started when he was an expert witness in a local Ohio child-porn prosecution in 2004, in which his testimony and morphed images helped convince a judge to drop the pornography-related charges in a rape case.

    He had used the morphed pictures as exhibits in a nuanced legal defense.

    Given that the law prohibited “knowingly” accessing child pornography, Boland argued, it violated the First Amendment on “vagueness and over-breadth grounds” because a defendant could not know whether what he was viewing was an actual or virtual image of a child having sex.


    The parents learned of the photo morphing from the FBI, according to the girls’ attorney. They’re suing over Boland transforming a picture of a 5-year-old girl eating a doghnut into one of her having oral sex. Another photo was of a 6-year-old girl’s face placed on the body of an adult woman having sex with two men. Boland purchased the pictures from iStockPhoto, according to court records.

    The appeals court noted that Boland could have attempted to make his legal defense without creating or possessing child pornography.

    “Boland could have illustrated the difficulty of discerning real from virtual images by combining two innocent pictures into another innocent picture,” the court wrote. It added that once Boland modified the images of the minors, “he crossed the line between possessing lawful images and violating the statute.”

    Still, the appeals court said Boland could try to convince the judge presiding over the girls’ civil lawsuit that the children are not entitled to damages. That’s because the law requires them to have suffered “personal injury.” In this case, the children don’t know about the pictures, so they haven’t suffered any psychological harm, he said.

    The parents are “insisting I owe them hundreds of thousands of dollars for harm these children don’t even know is going on,” Boland said.

    But the parents’ attorney, Jonathan Rosenbaum, said the harm was real enough. The pictures, he said in a telephone interview Thursday, were distributed in disc format to an untold number of “defense lawyers and different clerks of courts.”

    “Their faces have been abused and misappropriated in the most disgusting manner,” Rosenbaum said. “How would you like this to happen to your children?”
    Source

    We're overdue for an uncomfortable topic, I think. Since these are (manipulated) images of real people, the case for this type of thing being illegal is a bit stronger, but is it enough? In theory, the anti-pedophilia laws are to protect children from being victimized in order to produce that shit, but nobody here was really victimized in the manner that the laws were meant to protect from. Is the potential damage to their reputation enough? If so, why should it only apply to children, and not to non-consenting adults? What does this mean for 4Chan and their mascot? Will Batman escape from this terrible toxic trap and stop the clown prince of crime in time?

  2. #2
    *facepalm*

    He should have blurred their faces.

  3. #3
    I still don't know how to respond to this. Read it three times now. I find that ... I just don't know. Agree with Agmemnus, though.
    The worst job in the world is better than being broke and homeless

  4. #4
    Quote Originally Posted by agamemnus View Post
    *facepalm*

    He should have blurred their faces.
    Would that have even mattered? I doubt anyone's ever going to get an innocent verdict (almost said "get off" there...) on real pedophilia because the children's faces are blurred out. He should have used adults.

  5. #5
    While blurring probably would have been smart, it would have also made his point a bit less compelling (especially in the case where he made a girl eating a donut become a girl eating...something else).

    But I have to really fault the parents here. They hired out (prostituted?) their kids to a stock photo agency. That photo could have literally appeared anywhere and in any context. An article about an explosion of teen herpes. A Website about kids who wet the bed. Anything.

    In college my sister was part of a stock photo shoot that involved her talking to a group of people. It ended up in a pretty intense Christian magazine article called "Talking to your non-believer friends about Jesus" or something. Would my sister have grounds to sue because she's not a fundamentalist Christian? No. She was compensated for the fact that the photo could appear anywhere.

  6. #6
    Hang on, is he being sued by the parents or is he being charged with a crime??
    "One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."

  7. #7

  8. #8
    I bet those girls turn into the slutty whores that live down my street in about 10-12 years and that this actually helps their career in the sex industry.
    Last edited by Omega; 01-22-2011 at 06:59 PM.

  9. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by Omega View Post
    I bet those girls turn into slutty whores that live down my street in about 10-12 years and that this actually helps their career in the sex industry.
    Seriously, wtf?
    "One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."

  10. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by Aimless View Post
    Seriously, wtf?
    What, every adult i know thinks children are so pure and innocent when we are quite actually the opposite. Last week, there was a couple who were suspended from my friend's school for giving/getting fellatio on school grounds after school.

  11. #11
    Every adult has been a child at one time.

    Also, not all girls are whores.

    Since you have zero experience in that field yourself, why not just stick to the thread topic instead of trying to insert your attempt at humor. I know you are trying to emulate others here, but it's not cute when they do it either.

    To keep on topic, the guy is obviously a dumbass but I don't think in this particular instance that he should be sued for pornography. If iStock has some sort of policy about not using their images in a derogatory manner, that would be the only thing I could see him being guilty of (other than not using his brain on this instance). He only used the material for court purposes. I might feel a little different if he was distributing the material to others for entertainment purposes.

    Though in the last sentence it said that others had copies of the photos. Does that count as distribution, even if the pictures are shopped?

  12. #12
    Nah, one of my best friends is a cum-guzzling slut. She's told me all about her sexual escapades and although she parties a lot, she remains a good student. she's told me countless stories about her friends and whatnot. and i'm pretty sure if there are pictures of you in your bra/you bending down on fb which conveniently allows the world to see your hot-pink bedazzled thong, then you're a slut. especially if there are 5+ of those AND you made one your profile. just because i'm not active, doesn't mean i'm out of the loop...a lot of my friends all across VA aren't virgins anymore. so i wouldn't say i have a faulty sample since my friends in canada are equally as active.

  13. #13
    You consider teens behaving normally to be the same thing as exploiting and sexually abusing children? That's pretty fucked up.

  14. #14
    Stingy DM Veldan Rath's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Catgrrl View Post
    Also, not all girls are whores.
    Perhaps, but they all have cooties!

    It's a fact!
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  15. #15
    The guy getting busted here seems to have been to caught up in his work. So determined in the case he was working on, he got lost in the issue he was threading. I don't think that makes him a bad person that needs to charged with a crime here.

    I have zero sympathy for parents who whore out pictures of their children for profit, especially to stock photo collections.
    Last edited by Ominous Gamer; 01-24-2011 at 02:09 PM.

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