Opinion ID: 151874
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Victim

Text: Most of the district court's reasons for the major variance it imposed relate to the history and characteristics of the defendant component of the § 3553(a)(1) factor, and it is here where most of the court's errors in judgment leading to the unreasonable sentence can be found. To begin with, the district court viewed Irey, who had raped, sodomized, and tortured fifty underage girls, as himself a victim. The court said exactly that: I recognize, of course, that Mr. Irey and his family and friends are also victims here; and society at large is a victim because, as Dr. Shaw indicated ... the Internet ... has made possible an epidemic of child pornography. Dr. Shaw never said that Irey was a victim of the availability of child pornography on the internet. Nor did Dr. Berlin. Nor did defense counsel. Nor did Irey himself. The only one who saw Irey as a victim was the district court. There are two problems with the district court's re-casting of the predator as prey: its factual premise and its legal premise. The problem factually is not with the court's explicit finding that the internet has made possible an epidemic of child pornography. No one disputes that. Nor is the problem with the court's implicit finding that the availability of child pornography on the internet has caused some children to be sexually abused by pedophiles who would otherwise have restrained themselves. In discussing pedophilia generally, Dr. Shaw testified that the availability of child pornography on the internet has fueled an epidemic of pedophilia that was kind of probably in the background, people might not have even known that they suffered from it, and then come across these images. So there is a basis in the record for finding that some pedophiles are excited to action by the child pornography on the internet. That is not the factual problem. The factual problem is, instead, with the district court's implicit finding that child pornography on the internet caused Irey, the only defendant before the court, to sexually abuse children. We know that it did not, and we know that from no less of an authority than Irey himself. In a letter he wrote to the district court a week before sentencing, Irey stated that he did not start viewing child pornography on the internet until after he had begun having sex with the little girls in Cambodia. [25] The government has insisted throughout this appeal, however, that it is not challenging any of the district court's factfindings, only the court's characterizations, its application of law to fact, the weight it assigned to various factors, and the overall reasonableness of the sentence it imposed. For that reason, we will not disturb the district court's clearly erroneous finding that the existence of child pornography on the internet enticed Irey to sexually abuse children or was a contributing cause of his doing so, and we will instead accept that finding as a given in our analysis. The more fundamental problem with the district court's recasting of Irey-the-criminal as Irey-the-victim is the legal premise behind it, one that suggests the criminal is like his victims. Irey is the wrongdoer, the predator, the victimizer. The little girls in Cambodia are the wronged, the prey, the victims. The district court should have kept the two separate and not commingled them in its thinking. Child molesters and the children who are their victims do not occupy the same moral plane or position or anything resembling it. A man who sexually violates little children is no more entitled to be considered a victim of child pornography on the internet than a defendant who rapes an adult woman is entitled to be considered a victim of sexually provocative images on television. The victims in this case are the underage girls, some as young as four years old, whom Irey violated for his own perverse pleasure, filming that violation for distribution worldwide. Suggesting that Irey, like those little children, was a victim is absurd. Even defense counsel refused to defend it before us. [26] The district court's view of Irey as a victim permeated its reasoning and tainted its weighing of the § 3553(a) factors, including (a)(1), which is the nature and circumstances of the offense and the history and characteristics of the defendant. The nature of an offense would tend to seem less morally outrageous if the one who committed it were himself a victim. And if the characteristics of the defendant include being a victim, he is naturally more sympathetic than otherwise.