The Supreme Court on Monday upheld a 2003 federal law aimed at child pornography, concluding in a 7-to-2 opinion that a federal appeals court was wrong to find the law unconstitutionally vague.
The law in question arose from a sensible, constitutionally acceptable approach by Congress to correct faults that the high court found in an earlier child-pornography law, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the court.
“Child pornography harms and debases the most defenseless of our citizens,” Justice Scalia wrote. “Both the state and federal governments have sought to suppress it for many years, only to find it proliferating through the new medium of the Internet.”
The ruling scathingly rejected contentions that the 2003 legislation was so broadly written that it could make it a crime to share or even describe depictions of children in explicit sexual situations, even if the depictions are inaccurate, the children do not really exist and the intention is innocent.
Under what conditions could one infer an innocent intention when confronted with a depiction of children in explicit sexual situations?