The Court Punted, and It Was a Good Punt 0

The Federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals declined to consider free speech issues, but still ruled that a prosecutor could not charge a teen-aged girl with child porn because a revealing picture of her was on (several) someone else’s cell phone(s).

The prosecutor wanted to turn childhood dumbness into a felony because the girl refused to attend an “education program” of the his choosing (several other girls were involved, but only one took the prosecutor to court).

The court avoided ruling that the case involved a Constitutional issue (judges usually try to avoid ruling on Constitutional issues unless they can find no other way out). Instead, they ruled that the prosecutor acted in an arbitrary and capricious manner:

The court did rule that the district attorney had been wrong to threaten to charge the teen merely for refusing to attend the program.

The court said the girl, then 16 and identified as the daughter of “Jane Doe,” had “a likelihood of success” on the claim that the threatened prosecution was based not on probable cause of a crime but “instead in retaliation for Doe’s exercise of her constitutional rights not to attend the education program.”

Clearly, the girls were silly, stupid, and thoughtless. Teenagers are often silly, stupid, and thoughtless (as I recall, “thoughtless” was one of my mother’s favorite adjectives).

Threatening a felony charge was using a sledge hammer to clean a kitchen counter. (I suspect that any the pornographic content was not in the picture, but in the prosecutor’s head.)