Charles Rust-Tierney is in some serious trouble:
Federal agents arrested Charles Rust-Tierney, the former president of the Virginia chapter of the ACLU, Friday in Arlington for allegedly possessing child pornography.
According to a criminal complaint obtained by ABC News, Rust-Tierney allegedly used his e-mail address and credit card to subscribe to and access a child pornography website.
The complaint states that federal investigations into child pornography websites revealed that "Charles Rust-Tierney has subscribed to multiple child pornography website over a period of years."
The charge is possession, but it is not clear that he did anything more than create accounts.
The ACLU will probably argue on that point.
See, the ACLU believes that child porn is OK if it just depicts children, without actually using them:
1. Non-obscene descriptions or depictions of sexual conduct that do not involve real children are a form of speech protected by the First Amendment. (Reaffirming Ferber.)
2. The government should focus its efforts on education and punishment for violations of the law rather than abridgment of the rights of free speech. Slip Opinion at 7 [Kingsley Int'l Pictures Corp. v. Regents of Univ. of N.Y., 360 U.S. 684, 689 (1959)] Thus, the focus should be on those who actually harm children in the creation of child pornography rather than on those who create something from their imagination.
3. The fact that speech may be used to perpetrate a crime, for example, enticement or seduction, is insufficient reason to ban the speech. "The government may not prohibit speech because it increases the chance an unlawful act will be committed 'at some indefinite future time.'" Slip Opinion at 15 [Hess v. Indiana, 414 U.S. 105,108 (1973) (per curiam)]
The ACLU is also arguing that you can entice someone to indulge in child porn and that enticement is protected . Does that include the enticement of money?
Doesn't matter. If this was the case, if Rust-Tierney really became fascinated with child porn because of the time spent defending aspects of it, it goes to show just how nasty it really is. It's like a disease, and spending too much time near it, for whatever reason, increases your chance of catching it.
