Opinion ID: 1057919
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: State v. Pickett

Text: When police discovered images of nude children on his personal computer, Kelly Michael Pickett was indicted on eleven counts of sexual exploitation of a minor in violation of Tennessee Code Annotated section 39-17-1003 (2003). Prior to trial, Pickett filed a motion to dismiss the entire indictment, alleging that Tennessee Code Annotated section 39-17-1003 was unconstitutional on its face. In the alternative, he sought dismissal of ten of the counts on grounds of multiplicity. The trial court ruled that the charges in the indictment were not multiplicitous. As to Pickett's constitutional challenge, the trial court concluded that resolution of the issue was not capable of determination without a trial of the general issue. The case proceeded to trial without a jury some eleven months later. The testimony established that in October of 1999, Pickett moved his personal computer to the residence of a friend, Allen Birney, who had Internet access. Thereafter, Pickett visited the Birney residence regularly in order to use the computer. On one occasion, Birney observed an unusual image on the screen while Pickett was using the computer. He later accessed some files on the computer and discovered images depicting nude children, one of which was a representation of two young boys engaged in oral sex. When Birney confronted Pickett, demanding that he either delete the images or remove the computer from the residence, Pickett claimed that the images had been e-mailed to him by a friend. After being alerted that Pickett possessed child pornography, Detectives Robert Carrigan and Grant Carroll of the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department asked for and received permission from Pickett to search the computer. They discovered numerous images of nude children stored in the computer's temporary Internet file. Detective Carroll testified that he found images of both prepubescent and teenage girls in provocative poses. Detective Carroll explained that when a user visits a website that contains images, the images are automatically stored in the temporary Internet file. A more thorough search of Pickett's computer revealed even more stored images. Detective Stanley Mitchell of the Computer Forensics Laboratory of the police department testified that in addition to those images contained in the temporary Internet file, there were more than one hundred images in the computer's unallocated space. Detective Mitchell explained that the images could have been placed in the computer's unallocated space when Pickett visited child pornography websites or when he downloaded and then deleted images from either the Internet, a diskette, or an e-mail. The officer explained that there was no way to conclusively determine how the images had been stored in the unallocated space. Following the trial, the trial court upheld the constitutionality of Tennessee Code Annotated section 39-17-1003 and found Pickett guilty of eleven counts of sexual exploitation of a minor based upon eleven of the images recovered from his computer. On appeal, the Court of Criminal Appeals held that the statute was not unconstitutional but dismissed ten of the eleven convictions, concluding that the charges were multiplicitous.