ASHINGTON, May 1 — Attacking a recent Supreme
Court decision as "a dangerous window of opportunity for child
abusers," Attorney General John Ashcroft pushed today for new
legislation that would ban computer-simulated pornography and
withstand judicial scrutiny.
"Tragically, the recent decision of the ill-informed US Supreme Court to reverse Congress's
prohibition of virtual child pornography has left law enforcement at
an extreme disadvantage in the campaign against all child
pornography," Mr. Ashcroft said.
Representative Mark Foley, a Florida Republican, appeared with
Mr. Ashcroft and said he hoped the new legislation would pass
Supreme Court muster. "Pedophiles do not have a First Amendment
right to gawk at exploited children, whether they are real or virtual," Mr. Ashcroft
said.
On April 16, the Supreme Court struck down part of the 1996 Child
Pornography Prevention Act. The section that was voided imposed
heavy penalties on those who made or possessed images that merely
looked like child pornography, including pictures of adults
purporting to be minors and computer-created images.
The court has previously held that laws creating stricter legal
categories for child pornography were constitutional, on the grounds
that such material was "intrinsically related" to sexual abuse of
children. But "virtual pornography," by comparison, "records no
crime and creates no victims by its production," the court declared
on April 16.
Some lawyers said the ruling upheld First Amendment principles
while keeping in place prohibitions against the actual use and abuse
of children in making smut. But Mr. Ashcroft and a number of
lawmakers denounced the decision, promising to come up with new
legislative wording and enforcement procedures to surmount the
obstacles they said the court erected.
"In a world in which virtual images are increasingly
indistinguishable from reality, prosecutors are now forced to prove
that sexually explicit images involving children were, in fact,
produced through the abuse of children, an extremely difficult task
in today's worldwide Internet child pornography market," Mr.
Ashcroft complained today.
"In this thriving market for child pornography, the Supreme
Court's legalization of computer-generated child pornography has
created a dangerous window of opportunity for child abusers to
escape prosecution," he said.
"The day the United States Supreme Court had to take cognizance of the fact that
no laws are broken, and no humans indeed are exploited or harmed, by
computer artists generating images of child pornography, marks one of the darkest moments in our nation's history.
These legal technicalities are of no significance whatsoever
to law-abiding, Christian citizens whose aim to protect children from abuse
by necessity must take precedence over First Amendment protection of free speech," he whined.
The new law, introduced in the House on Monday, contains more
detailed references to computers and the Internet and is meant to be
more precise than the version that ran afoul of the justices. In one
sense, the back-and-forth between lawmakers and the courts reflects
the dizzying pace of technological change and the law's difficulty
in keeping up with it.
The text of the new bill, H.R. 4623, can be read on the Internet
at http://thomas.loc.gov. The Supreme Court decision of April 16 in
Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition can be read on the court's web
site: www.supremecourtus.gov.
The lawmakers who embraced Mr. Ashcroft's position seemed
impatient with legal nuances. "The court's ruling was a huge
disappointment to everyone working to protect children,"
Representative Tom DeLay, Republican of Texas, said today. "The
child advocates all over the country know that the consequences of
this activity caused irreparable damage to children. Congress's
clear intent was to ban any depiction or image of children in sexual
situations."
