Article from Reason by J.D. Tuccile.
“This is a shocking case. This is a case that calls for jury nullification.”
Many have had similar reactions when confronting cases involving authorities running roughshod over people with bad laws, punitive sentences, and ill-considered prosecutions. But this time, the person invoking jury nullification was a federal judge—District Judge Stefan R. Underhill of the District of Connecticut—and he spoke in court about a case over which he presided.
The prosecution that shocked Underhill involves Yehudi Manzano, a 30-something man charged with producing and transporting child pornography after saving, and then deleting, a video of his teenage sex partner to and from his own phone and its associated Google cloud account. “The only people who ever saw it were the guy who made it, the girl who was in it, and the federal agents,” Norman Pattis, Manzano’s attorney, told me.
But that, prosecutors say in the indictment, was enough for the federal government to proceed with charges under the assumption that Manzano acted “knowing and having reason to know that: such visual depiction would be transported and transmitted using any means and facility of interstate and foreign commerce.” And that’s important, because the mandatory minimum sentence under federal law for recording video of sex with an underage partner is 15 years.
Read the entire article at Reason.
Image Credit: By St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
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Evidently this judge believes that 15 years is too much for making a record of a sex act with a teenager and then insuring that it would be preserved in perpetuity by Google. And he wants a jury to do what? Nullify the prosecution by finding the man not guilty because the judge can’t give him a slap-on-the wrist sentence? This makes me wonder why this judge has so much sympathy for a man who committed what many of us consider to be a heinous act.
the judge must be a former catholic priest who dindu nuffin…..let perverts burn in hell…15 years is too light a sentence