Eideard

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

A Roman Catholic priest in Missouri has been indicted on federal child pornography charges.

The indictment…charges the Rev. Shawn Francis Ratigan still took sexually suggestive photographs months after church officials removed him from a parish position and ordered him to stay away from children, The Kansas City Star reported. At the time, Easter Sunday this year, officials had not yet reported Ratigan to police.

Ratigan also faces state charges.

“When a person who has been placed in a position of trust exploits and victimizes children, he victimizes the entire community,” U.S. Attorney Beth Phillips said. “The indictment today sends a strong message that this type of behavior will not be tolerated.”

Ratigan was ordained in 2004. The indictment charges that a year later he took lewd photographs of a 6-year-old girl at St. Joseph Church in Easton, Mo.

Late last year, Ratigan was removed from parish work and transferred to the Vincentian Mission House in Independence, Mo. but his alleged activities were not reported to police until May. The official in the Kansas City diocese in charge of dealing with allegations of clerical abuse was removed in June largely because of his [non] handling of the case.

Time and again the Catholic Church figures they know better than the law of the land. In any case they think they need not answer to secular civil law.

Wrong! Again.

In the ugly case of George Reardon, child abuser/pornographer who was St. Francis Hospital’s head of endocrinology, the medical center has had multiple opportunities to take the high road.

Over decades, Reardon, who died in ’98, lured children into his office under the guise of a bogus growth study. Without the accompaniment of a chaperone, Reardon would have the children strip and he’d fondle, and sexually abuse them, and pose them for pornographic pictures.

Reardon’s bosses didn’t ask about the results of his “study,” even though no papers were ever published.

But there was child porn. In 2007, Reardon’s hidden pornographic library was found in his former West Hartford home. Immediately the hospital dug in its heels, and on Tuesday, attorneys for St. Francis were in Courtroom 3B in Waterbury Superior Court in the first civil case of 90-some lawsuits filed by former Reardon patients.

The hospital will try to prove its ignorance of Reardon’s decades-long abuse. This after months and months of delays and motions and scare tactics from an organization that is —- according to one of its recent ads — “committed to health and healing through excellence, compassionate care and reverence for the spirituality of each person…”

Judge Dan Shaban said presentation of evidence in this case would most likely last into mid-May. One victim told me she can’t understand St. Francis’ stance. “Their defiance in the face of so much evidence leaves me baffled,” she said.

On Tuesday, one attorney said childhood sexual abuse is like throwing a hand grenade into a child’s life. You may be able to put the pieces back, but you’re going to need help. After this case’s first day in court, we are reminded that Reardon’s victims once again won’t be able to count on help from his employer.

Reardon apparently was a world-class child pornographer. Photos were annotated as available for sale or trade. 50,000 to 60,000 slides and 130 reels of film were found in the walls of his home – when the folks who bought the home after Reardon’s death started a renovation.

The hospital picked up the tab for the cameras for his “study”.

An internet firm linked to many of the internet’s criminal gangs has been shut down.

The US Federal Trade Commission said Belize-based 3FN aided gangs that ran botnets, carried out phishing attacks and traded in images of child abuse.

The servers and net hardware of 3FN have been seized and are due to be sold off as the firm is dismantled.

The operators of 3FN must also pay back $1.08 million they are reputed to have made by hosting criminal sites…

It was involved in distributing spyware, viruses and trojans, had a hand in many phishing schemes and helped gangs sell illegal images. It also acted as a discussion forum for many spammers.

In particular, said the FTC, the net firm worked with fraudsters who run botnets and helped them steal data by seeding hijacked computers with keyloggers. It maintained a library of more than 4500 malicious programs that could pilfer data from hijacked PCs.

In June last year, the FTC used an injunction to cut 3FN off from other hosting providers and sever its connections to the net.

Now the FTC has gone a step further and won a court order that will see the company stop trading and its hardware confiscated. The FBI has been ordered to carry out the shut down and seizure operation.

Overdue.

A teenage girl who appeared topless in a “sexting” cell phone picture that was distributed among her middle-school classmates should face child-pornography charges so argues a Pennsylvania prosecutor before a U.S. appellate court.

In the first U.S. case to test the constitutional status of “sexting,” the American Civil Liberties Union countered that the incident does not come close to meeting the definition of child pornography which typically depicts graphic sexual acts with minors and is done for commercial gain.

The ACLU also said the Wyoming County prosecutor erred when he threatened 16 teenagers with the felony charges unless they agreed to a participate in a “re-education” course on why sexting was wrong…

Pictures showed two of the girls wearing white bras and another standing topless outside a shower with a towel wrapped around her waist, the ACLU said. The pictures did not show any sexual activity…

But the county argued that the pictures were pornographic because they were disseminated for the purposes of sexual stimulation and so would be of great interest to child molesters.

Appellate Judge Thomas Ambro said prosecutors are not entitled to try to “re-educate” minors. “I don’t know of anything that allows the district attorney’s office to play the role of teacher,” he said.

Courts and politicians that concern themselves with morality should wend their way into non-existence. Such courts have no place in a modern, educated nation.

Adjudicating harm and damages, crimes and misdemeanors, is tough enough. Presuming religious sway over behavior is a couple centuries out of place.

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Thanks, Jägermeister

One in five US teenagers admit to sexting. It may seem like harmless fun to a 15-year-old wanting to impress their new boyfriend or girlfriend. But the practice of sexting – sending nude or semi-nude images of oneself to others via mobile phones – is having unintended and, in some cases, tragic consequences.

The risk of having one’s private pictures distributed among schoolmates or uploaded on to social-networking websites is only one part of it. It could also lead to a criminal conviction as a sex offender for any teenager who forwards them on to someone else.

Sending or distributing explicit photos of a child under 18 is, in many countries, illegal. It is also illegal to send such photos to a minor – even if both parties consent to it.

A spate of cases in the United States has seen several “sexting” teenagers arrested on charges of child pornography – alarming parents, school officials, police and prosecutors. It has led people to ask whether threatening children with the same law that was drawn up to protect them – and potentially creating many more sex offenders – is the best way to tackle the phenomenon of “sexting”?

But Witold Walczak, legal director for ACLU in Pennsylvania who is fighting one such case on behalf of the pupils, said, “Child porn is about the abuse and exploitation of minors by adults. That’s not happening here,” he said.

Is it beyond comprehension to suggest we have standards for prosecutors and judges that involve common sense? These nutballs are getting ready to run for office as head of the Spanish Inquisition. Or the nearest equivalent in square America.

Laws written for the purpose of halting the exploitation of childrem haven’t a damned thing to do with sexting. Period. Stupidity maybe; but, not crime.

One summer night in 2007, a pair of 13-year-old northeastern Pennsylvania girls decided to strip down to their skivvies to beat the heat.

As Marissa Miller talked on the phone and Grace Kelly flashed a peace sign, a third girl took a candid shot of the teens in their white bras.
It was harmless, innocent fun, the teens say.

But the picture somehow wound up on classmates’ cell phones, and a prosecutor has threatened to charge Miller and Kelly with child pornography or open lewdness unless they participate in a five-week after-school program followed by probation.

On Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union asked a federal judge to block Wyoming County District Attorney George Skumanick Jr. from filing charges, saying that the teens didn’t consent to having the picture distributed and that the image is not pornography, in any event.

Skumanick said he would fight the lawsuit. “Frankly, we just wanted to protect these kids…

The ACLU’s lawsuit claims…the photos are protected First Amendment speech.

Basic premise #1: people who think images distributed electronically are like carrying a single copy to show a friend and, then, bringing it back home safely are too ignorant for polite description.

Basic premise #2: 19th Century moralists in cop suits are about as useful to the process of moderating communications between human brings as a cast-iron gag. The all-seeing eye of someone who’s growing old awaiting his turn to run for governor.

UPDATE: The ACLU and the girls won their case and the judge has ordered charges dropped. Bravo for common sense.

Police appealed today for help hunting a “dangerously radioactive” college principal wanted on child porn charges.

Seriously-ill Thomas Leopold, who had been given large doses of radiation for a thyroid condition, skipped bail shortly before his trial two weeks ago. He then drove on to a ferry heading for Rosslare in County Wexford, south-east Ireland.

The 42-year-old head of a tutorial college in Harrow, Middlesex, has not been seen since.

A judge at Southwark crown court, John Price, who issued a warrant for his arrest, accused him of “doing everything to make it as difficult as he can to let the trial go ahead.

“Please warn officers that when he is arrested he might be radio­active. This is not a joke.”

Cripes. So, this dude is a freak whose arrest may also endanger the arresting officers? Where’s that big vacuum cleaner in the sky we can use just to suck him off the face of the Earth?

An appeal judge in Australia has ruled that an animation depicting well-known cartoon characters engaging in sexual acts is child pornography.

The internet cartoon featured characters from the Simpsons TV series. The central issue in the case was whether a cartoon character could depict a real person.

Judge Michael Adams decided that it could, and found a man from Sydney guilty of possessing child pornography on his computer…

Justice Michael Adams said the purpose of anti-child pornography legislation was to stop sexual exploitation and child abuse where images of “real” children were depicted…

He ruled that the animated cartoon could “fuel demand for material that does involve the abuse of children,” and therefore upheld the conviction for child pornography.

For me, this is a judge making a political decision about a law which hasn’t been properly or appropriately defined. Aside from the fact I consider the decision patently absurd.

A Nazi sympathiser, described by police as extremely dangerous, has been found guilty of planning acts of terrorism and of possessing child pornography after investigators found homemade bombs and indecent images of children at his home.

Martyn Gilleard, 31, a forklift truck driver from Goole, east Yorkshire, pleaded guilty in two separate cases at Leeds crown court after police found “significant” volumes of extreme right-wing literature, weapons, ammunition and homemade expolsives in his flat last October.

About 39,000 indecent images of children were also seized.

Humberside police, searching only for the child pornography, found the racist material and called in the Leeds counter-terrorism unit. Gunpowder, fuses, camouflage clothing, balaclavas, a bombmaking manual, telescopic sights, knives, a machete and rifle, were discovered. Residents were evacuated as bomb disposal experts removed the explosive material.

Cripes! He did everything except eat neighborhood cats.

Sentenced to 16 years total for all offenses.