Contun said:
Droppa Deuce said:
I can
kinda agree with the crossing the line, but I don't think it warrants twenty years in prison and all the grief that comes with it.
I'm sure others do too.
I'd say most people were concerned about the prison sentence being suggested, not him getting community service or what have you.
I'm not concerned over the sentence. I'm more concerned over the porn aspects of it being used to make the arguement. I wrote a more detailed opinion earlier on the thread.
To put it bluntly, the guy deserves prison time. Let me put it to you this way, in cases where you see little kids doing lewd things for the sake of humor on TV or whatever, the kids in question are actors, and this is being done with the consent of the parents in a controlled enviroment. The problem here is that this guy was using the images of the kids, in a rather crude and demeaning capacity, both without their knowlege and consent, and without that of the parents. If someone did something like this with your kid, you'd be POed too. We don't know how many kids are involved, but understand that every one of them and every family was victimized here. If you say that each one is a minimum felony conviction of a year and there were 20 kids in the crowd then yeah... 20 years in prison sounds right. Is this overkill? Well to be honest I haven't seen the video, but the part that kind of irks me about it was that he was apparently performing the video publically, and while they made it sound like amateur antics I'm not personally convinced he didn't make money off of it either, which would make things even worse.
The *kiddie porn* charges are what I disagree with, since that strikes me as going a bit too far, unless this video is a heck of a lot worse than it sounds. The nature of child porn is a debatable subject, and I have mixed opinions, however we've been down this road before, and truthfully I don't think it should be an issue unless a real kid is actually being sexually assaulted. It opens up too much room for abuse or witch hunts otherwise. I think you can find something disturbing and distasteful without actually making it illegal, and in most cases where real kids are involved in ambigious matters, there are other laws like child endangerment that can be brought up.
On the case itself, the more I think about it, in addition to the point I made above, he could be convicted of a lot of other things as well depending on the state and town. I know a lot of schools don't allow recording or picture taking without express permission (for a lot of reasons, such as kidnapping, blackmail, or whatever else). I have a hard time believing he received permission to enter the school and sing that song on a seperate visit while recording it (so he could splice footage). The recording itself could violate a local or even state policy in the second case, and criminal tresspass could also be an issue.
The bottom line is you don't do crap like this with people's kids, he deserves to have the book thrown at him. If I think my kids are safe in school I'm going to be royally POed myself to see something like that on youtube.
