Court Opinion

ID: 9803308
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 15:30:08.904358+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T10:03:01.355482
License: Public Domain

REINHARDT, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
Like Judge Noonan, I concur in the unanimous opinion of the court. Also, like Judge Noonan, I am disturbed about the practical impact of the child pornography laws upon otherwise law-abiding individuals. I do not agree, however, that advertising the legal consequences is a solution to the problem. Rather, it is my view that “psychological impairment” is in most, if not all, cases the cause of the criminal conduct. Whether psychiatric treatment rather than incarceration would be the proper response by state authorities is a matter that I would hope would be given more serious consideration than it has un*1058til now. Surely sentences of five to twenty years for a first offense of viewing child pornography are not the solution. See 18 U.S.C. § 2252(b)(1). Nor are mandatory sentences of fifteen to forty years for a second. See id.
My concern is not with those who produce or distribute child pornography for financial gain. Such individuals willfully do serious injury to the most vulnerable members of our society and deserve whatever punishment the law provides. Certainly no one can have much sympathy with those who prey upon young children in order to benefit themselves. Those individuals are ordinarily motivated by wholly selfish interests that they are perfectly capable of controlling. In contrast, those who only view child pornography, including those who exchange video computer files, are in all likelihood the victims of a form of mental illness that prevents them from controlling what they would otherwise understand to be not only unhealthy impulses but impulses that result in great harm to the most innocent members of our society.
I do not profess to know the solution to the problem of how to cure the illness that causes otherwise law-abiding people to engage in the viewing of child pornography. I know only that lengthy sentences such as the one in this case, ten years (and below the guidelines at that) for a first offense, cannot be the answer.
There is nothing new in what I say here, but it is a problem that I believe deserves more attention than we have given it thus far. Many lives of otherwise decent people have been ruined by psychological problems they are not presently capable of controlling. Incarcerating them will not end the horror of child pornography or the injury it inflicts on innocent children. All it accomplishes is to create another class of people with ruined lives — victims of serious mental illness who society should instead attempt to treat in a constructive and humane manner.