Court Opinion

ID: 9494456
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:38:16.532456+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:56:25.412115
License: Public Domain

POSNER, Circuit Judge,
with whom MANION, Circuit Judge, joins, dissenting from the denial of hearing en banc.1
This case is well worth the attention of the full court. It requires us to consider why child pornography, a growing subject of federal criminal prosecution, has been criminalized. It is true that the constitutionality of a statutory provision similar to the one under which the defendant was convicted is now before the Supreme Court, see Free Speech Coalition v. Reno, 198 F.3d 1083 (9th Cir.1999), cert. granted under the name Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 531 U.S. 1124, 121 S.Ct. 876, 148 L.Ed.2d 788 (2001), but that is an argument at most for granting hearing en banc but postponing the hearing till the Court’s decision is handed down; for it is entirely possible that the decision, if it reverses the Ninth Circuit, will have no effect on our case.
The panel opinion answers the question I have put of why child pornography is criminal by saying that Congress wants to protect the children who are used in the production of such pornography; other concerns to which such pornography might give rise are not identified by the panel and are dismissed by it as distinctly secondary. The government in its brief goes so far as to state that the children used in the production, of pornography are “the victims” of child pornography, period, the implication being that Congress had no other consequences of child pornography in mind in deciding to criminalize it. This is a complete misunderstanding of the statute under which Sherman was convicted, 18 U.S.C. § 2252A, as is evident from the text and the legislative history, S.Rep. No. 358, 104th Cong., 2d Sess. (1996), both of which the government considerately printed in the appendix to its brief.
Sherman was convicted of three counts of possessing child pornography. Each count involved photographs of different children, but he asked that the counts be “grouped” for purposes of sentencing. The federal sentencing guidelines forbid grouping unless the counts involve “the same victim.” U.S.S.G. § 3D1.2(b). Application Note 2 to this guideline explains that “the term ‘victim’ is not intended to include indirect or secondary victims. *551Generally, there will be one person who is directly and most seriously affected by the offense and is therefore identifiable as the victim. For offenses in which there are no identifiable victims (e.g., drug or immigration offenses, where society at large is the victim), the ‘victim’ ... is the societal interest that is harmed. In such cases, the counts are grouped together when the societal interests that are harmed are closely related.” There’s a bit of a logical gap here; “secondary victims” are not to be considered in deciding whether to group offenses but on the other hand it is implied that this is true only if there are no identifiable victims — yet secondary victims might be identifiable. Since drug and immigration offenses, as I’m about to show, often do have identifiable secondary victims yet are offered as paradigmatic examples of “groupable” offenses, I believe that if the child pornography offense in section 2252A of the federal criminal code is like the drug offenses in the code, the primary “victim” is society at large. And as it is the same victim in all three counts, Sherman is entitled to have them grouped (with what effect on his sentence the briefs do not say) without regard to the presence of identifiable secondary victims.
I think that the offense in section 2252A is more like a drug offense than it is like such offenses as murder and robbery, with their clearly identifiable “primary” victims, and that the children used in the pornography are merely the secondary victims, much like many of the people employed in the drug trade — -the “mules” who die when the bags of cocaine that they’ve swallowed burst, the wives and girlfriends who are roped into assisting their husbands or boyfriends in the drug trade, the drug dealers killed in gang wars, and the addicts who turn to selling drugs to support their habit. Nominally, most of these are “consenting adults,” but, realistically, many are coerced or inveigled into criminal participation. Yet the principal concern behind the criminalization of drug dealing is not with any of these unfortunates; it is with the consumption of the drugs and with the entire range of consequences thought to flow from that consumption. Similarly, many illegal immigrants are abused, sometimes even enslaved, by employers or by the traffickers in illegal immigrants, but the chief concern behind the restrictions on immigration is not with those unfortunates but with the effect of unrestricted immigration on citizen employment, on crime, and on welfare and other government programs.
The adult men and women who perform in pornographic films may be degraded, exploited, and therefore victimized by their participation in the production of pornography, as argued in Catharine A. Mac-Kinnon, Only Words (1993), but they are not the primary victims. No more are the children used in the production of pornography the primary victims, at least in the judgment of Congress. We know this from the fact that as part of the Child Pornography Prevention Act under which Sherman was convicted Congress amended the definition of child pornography to make clear that it includes pornography created by means of realistic computer simulations or by using adults made up to look like children. See 18 U.S.C. § 2256(8), which defines “child pornography” for purposes of section 2252A. Congress did not prescribe a lesser sentence for child pornography the production of which does not involve the use of children; the sentencing provisions of the statute are the same regardless of whether children are used. And 18 U.S.C. § 2255 creates a private civil remedy for children who are victims of violations of the various child-pornography statutes, expressly including section 2252A; most of these are children molested by people like Sherman who traf-*552fíe in or purchase pornographic images, as distinct from the children used in the making of those images.
The Senate Report, which the government treats as authoritative regarding the purpose of the statute, states that “computer-generated child pornography poses the same threat to the well being of children as photographic child pornography,” S.Rep. No. 358, supra, at 15 (emphasis added). This statement would be nonsense if the government’s brief were correct in saying that “the victims” of child pornography are the children used in the making of it. The Senate Report makes clear that the principal concern behind criminalizing child pornography is the fear that it incites child molestation; and both “the effect of visual depictions of child sexual activity on a child molester or pedophile using that material to stimulate or whet his own sexual appetites” and “the danger to children who are seduced and molested with the aid of child sex pictures [are] just as great when the child pornographer or child molester uses visual depictions of child sexual activity produced wholly or in part by electronic, mechanical, or other means, including by computer, as when the material consists of unretouehed photographic images of actual children engaging in sexually explicit conduct.” Id. at 2. From the parity of concern that the statute and the legislative history express with respect to simulated and actual pornography we can infer that the primary victim is not the child used in the pornography but the child seduced or molested by a pedophile stimulated by such pornography. And not just that child, but the adult population; for we should be realistic and acknowledge that sheer disgust at people who have a sexual interest in prepubescent children is a principal motivation for such legislation. This is further evidence that the children used in the making of child pornography are not the primary victims, that the primary victims are a larger and more diffuse group, as in the case of drug and immigration offenses; or so at least that this is what Congress believes, which is all that matters. What the actual consequences of child pornography are I do not know; maybe the primary victims are the children used to make such pornography (maybe, for that matter, they are the only victims — maybe child pornography is a sex substitute rather than an incitement — apart from disgusted adults). That is not the issue. The issue is whom the statute deems the primary victims to be. Of that there is little doubt.
Since the children used in making child pornography are victims, albeit not the primary victims in the eyes of Congress, it may seem paradoxical to argue that merely because there are other victims Sherman should get a lighter sentence through grouping. But grouping is necessary to avoid results that I am sure even the members of the panel would regard as absurd. In United States v. Richardson, 238 F.3d 837, 839 (7th Cir.2001), the defendant had downloaded more than 70,000 separate photographic images of child pornography — if a different child had been used to make each of those images, would that mean that there were 70,000 separate victims of the defendant? Granted, extra counts can never require the addition of more than five additional offense levels. U.S.S.G. § 3D1.4. But the background note to this guideline suggests that the presence of additional victims may warrant the sentencing judge in departing upward from the guideline sentence. The result would be the imposition in many and perhaps most cases of the statutory maximum penalty (15 or 30 years, depending on whether the defendant is a recidivist, 18 U.S.C. § 2252A(b)(l)), if the analysis by the panel is correct.
*553One last point: At the end of its opinion, the court warns the government against using child pornography in stings of suspected violators of the child pornography statutes, since the sting inflicts on the children used in the pornography the same “haunting” injury (the embarrassment to the child, perhaps after he has grown up, of being recognized in a pornographic image by people who know him) that is one of the ways in which child pornography is believed to harm the children used in its production. The warning is empty, since, as the court recognizes, we have no authority to reverse a conviction because of governmental misconduct unless the defendant’s rights are violated, not the rights of third parties.