PHILADELPHIA — The first criminal case involving “sexting” reached a U.S. appeals court on Friday — a case that asks whether racy cell-phone photos of three girls amount to child pornography or child’s play.
A county prosecutor in Pennsylvania threatened to pursue felony charges if the girls skipped his “re-education” course on such topics as sexual predators and “what it means to be a girl in today’s society.”
The photos show two 12-year-olds in training bras at a sleepover and a topless 16-year-old stepping out of the shower.
MaryJo Miller, 45, of Tunkhannock, thought her daughter Marissa and friend Grace Kelly were being “goofballs” in the 2007 slumber-party shot, which mysteriously surfaced two years later in student cell phones confiscated at school.
“You’re going to see more provocative photos in a Victoria’s Secret catalog,” said Miller, a classroom aide in the Tunkhannock Area School District.
County officials say they are trying to address the pervasive problem of teens sexting, or exchanging sexually explicit photos and e-mails on their cell phones. According to one study, 20 percent of U.S. teens admit they have done it.
The American Civil Liberties Union considers the images in the Pennsylvania case harmless.
“We’ve been mystified how anybody can look at these photos and say these are second-degree felonies,” Witold Walczak, the ACLU of Pennsylvania’s legal director, argued Friday in the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals.
Either way, he said, officials are flipping the intent of child-pornography laws — to protect children — by going after the victims. It’s unclear who first disseminated the photographs. Each girl insists she did not.
“Turning them into sex offenders is an odd way to protect kids,” Walczak said.
“Naked pictures of children on the Internet draws predators the same way a swamp draws mosquitoes,” argued lawyer Michael Donohue of Scranton, who represents the prosecutor’s office. Authorities must sometimes protect children from themselves, he argued.
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