WASHINGTON -- A federal law that prohibits creating erotic images of minors should be upheld, antiporn groups told the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday.
The organizations filed a set of amicus briefs saying the Child Pornography Prevention Act, which outlaws even Photoshop-morphed images that "appear" to depict minors, does not violate the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of expression.
In January, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge to the CPPA brought by the Free Speech Coalition, an adult trade group that argued the law was too broadly worded.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 1999 that the law was unconstitutional, but four other appeals courts have disagreed.
"Counterfeit child porn is a clear and present danger to children because such realistic images would have the same incitement effect on pedophiles to molest children and the same seductive effect on children to become victims," says Bruce Taylor, the president of the National Law Center for Children and Families, which signed one of the briefs.
Taylor's brief, also signed by the National Coalition for the Protection of Children and Families and the Family Research Council, argues that the CPPA is valid because it only applies to realistic images or videos, not anime or drawings -- and because Congress was trying to help prosecutors stymied by the need to prove that a suspected image of child pornography actually involved a minor.
"Today, readily available and inexpensive computer software elevates cut-and-paste morphing and photo editing to a techno-art form, which can be difficult to discern even with careful expert examination. Present technology is improving to the point where even careful expert examination may not be sufficient to detect an expert forgery," the brief says.
It also argues that England and Canada have similar laws. Morality in Media, a New York-based conservative group, took a similar approach in its own court filing, arguing that "virtual child pornography has little or no social value."
As evidence that prosecutors are already running into problems when criminal defendants claim that images are computer-altered and include no actual minors, Morality in Media cites an Army appeals court ruling from earlier this year. It said: "The government may have had difficulty proving that real children were depicted in these images."
Other groups filing briefs on behalf of CPPA include the American Center for Law and Justice and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
The Free Speech Coalition, which is challenging the law, could not immediately be reached for comment. Civil liberties groups have argued that CPPA amounts to thought crime, since it punishes manipulations in Photoshop -- and molesting children has always been against the law.
In its 1999 opinion, the Ninth Circuit said the law violated the First Amendment. "The language of the statute questioned here can criminalize the use of fictional images that involve no human being, whether that fictional person is over the statutory age and looks younger, or indeed, a fictional person under the prohibited age," a panel ruled in a 2-to-1 decision. "Images that are, or can be, entirely the product of the mind are criminalized."
