Attack on children should be dealt with
- Thread starter Retired_Can_Soldier
- Start date
So lets do it Sassy's way and anyone who is caught up in a pedophile catch should immediately be sent to jail without a trial even if there is a slight possibility that they are innocent.
Sassylassie, I am in high school, and I absolutely refuse to invest any credence in this idea that the world is truly as hollow and bleak as some here would tend to inform me. Yes, I know, I am going to be flamed for this post most assuredly for being some sort of liberal communist, or whatever, but quite frankly, I don't give a damn.
I choose to look upon our system of governance with optimism and fresh ideas. And if it needs to be changed, then God damnit, I am going to be one of the hands that does it.
I choose to look upon our system of governance with optimism and fresh ideas. And if it needs to be changed, then God damnit, I am going to be one of the hands that does it.
Child porn suspects set to be cleared in evidence ‘shambles’
David Leppard
DOZENS of men accused of downloading child pornography from the internet may have been wrongly prosecuted, according to expert prosecution and defence witnesses.
New evidence suggests that Operation Ore, Britain’s biggest child pornography investigation, may have prosecuted innocent men on the basis of discredited American police testimony and questionable forensic methods.
Jim Bates, a computer expert who has served as a witness for the prosecution or the defence in more than 100 child porn cases, says many Ore cases are now likely to collapse or be overturned in the Court of Appeal. “It has been a shambles from the word go,” he said.
The nationwide police investigation was launched three years ago after a list of 7,200 British suspects was supplied to British police by American authorities.
The men on the list stand accused of having used their credit cards to pay for child porn through Landslide, a sex website that operated in Texas from 1996-9.
The accusations have led to 33 suicides, most recently that of Commodore David White, the commander of British forces in Gibraltar. He was found dead in his swimming pool on January 8.
Bates believes records of credit card transactions on the site are unreliable and therefore the names of alleged subscribers cannot be used as evidence.
Thomas Reedy, the man who set up the website, was investigated by the FBI in the 1990s for credit card fraud. “I am convinced that a massive fraud has been perpetrated at Landslide and an unknown number of subscriptions are fake,” said Bates.
He cites the case of Dr Paul Grout, a senior accident specialist at Hull Royal Infirmary, who was falsely accused of accessing child porn. Grout, who was praised for his help at the 2001 Selby rail crash, lost his £70,000-a-year job because of the allegations. Many of his friends “drifted off” and he and his wife Susie endured huge strains on their marriage.
It was not until his case came to Hull crown court in April last year that the Yorkshire doctor was able to prove his innocence. His lawyers showed that, while Grout had used his credit card to pay for a meal in a restaurant in Yorkshire, someone else had been using it 5,000 miles away in Lake Tahoe, America.
In a case that legal experts believe may prove a landmark judgment, Judge David Bentley threw out the prosecution argument. In his judgment, Bentley dismissed some police evidence as “utter nonsense”. He said the way the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) had held back some information vital to Grout’s defence had “stunk of unfairness”.
Another computer user wrongly accused of downloading child pornography was Robert Del Naja, frontman of the group Massive Attack. His arrest in February 2003 was leaked to the media but the case against him was dropped less than a month later.
One police officer, Peter Johnston, became so disillusioned at what he described as the Ore “witch-hunt” that he resigned from his job with Merseyside police.
In a letter to The Sunday Times, Johnston said: “I began to doubt the validity of the evidence surrounding the circumstances of the initial investigation in America . . . I found it difficult to rationalise how offenders had been identified solely on a credit card number.”
Bates believes that evidence, highlighted by Duncan Campbell, an investigative journalist and an expert witness in some Ore cases, could lead to many cases being dropped.
In an article in last week’s Sunday Times, Campbell revealed that sworn statements provided in British courts by two American detectives who initiated Operation Ore could no longer be relied upon.
The two, Dallas detective Steve Nelson and US postal inspector Michael Mead, had claimed that everyone who went to Landslide always did so through a front-page screen button saying “Click Here (for) Child Porn”.
But Campbell has established that the button was never on the website’s front page. Instead it was on an advertisement for another website buried deep in the Landslide website.
That discovery has effectively removed a key plank of many of the Ore prosecutions where no actual child porn was found.
Those prosecutions were based on the assertion that evidence that someone had paid to access Landslide automatically meant that they had paid to access child porn.
Steve Barker, a solicitor who acts for one Operation Ore suspect in a High Court appeal, said that in many prosecutions police were unable to disprove defendants had simply accessed legal adult porn rather than paedophile material. In other cases, child porn might have been accessed accidentally by those looking for adult porn.
The CPS has also disclosed that an internal inquiry has raised serious questions over the evidence provided by Brian Underhill, a key police witness in some 600 Ore cases. The CPS said it would now disclose the doubts raised by its inquiry to defence solicitors before future trials began.
The CPS last week defended its role in the hundreds of successful cases in which defendants had pleaded guilty. A spokeswoman said: “Each case was considered on its own merits and the evidence provided by police has been subject to thorough scrutiny.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-523-1678810-523,00.html
Operation Ore is the UK's biggest ever IT crime investigation, but expert witness Duncan Campbell reveals that many prosecutions were founded on falsehoods
They arrive without warning at six in the morning. Drowsily rising, Adam Smith finds two polite, suited men. 'Police. May we come in?'
The scene starts to shift. 'I am arresting you on suspicion of possessing and distributing child pornography. We have a search warrant.' Behind their backs, Smith sees a flurry of others moving in. They are firm but not aggressive - they know they are dealing with a middle-class, educated professional with no criminal history.
A female officer corners his wife and asks her if she knew her husband was a paedophile. Would she please make up an excuse for the kids not going to school today? A family social worker will be coming over to interview them - in case her husband has been abusing his own children.
Politeness is maintained at the police station. Booked in, interviewed. They ask him to confirm his credit card number and the email addresses he used in 1999. They show him a copy of a credit card bill they have already got from his bank. They point to a payment to Landslide Productions. 'You paid for child pornography; that's what that is.' He says 'no' and that he's never heard of that company.
The facts they put so confidently seem to fit, except that Smith has never had any interest in children other than being a good dad.
In one day, for no cause he can understand, Smith has become a pariah, one of the most hated, baited people in the country, a suspected child-molesting paedophile. In the months ahead, it will only get worse.
Even if his computer is eventually found
ADVERTISEMENT
to contain nothing more sexually unusual than the proportions of Samantha Fox, he faces months of fearing trial, stigma and possible jail, accused merely of 'inciting' the sale of child porn, based solely on computer data found years ago in a Texas office block.
Mass arrests
Operation Ore launched on British TV screens on 20 May 2002. The BBC led on 'mass arrests over online child porn'. Thirty-six people were arrested, with promises of thousands more to follow. It made for compelling television, and provoked a rash of tabloid activity, but it also led to increased pressure on the police to bring the remaining thousands to justice.
Unfortunately, not all the evidence presented was quite as clear cut as it seemed. Clearly visible on the bulletin was a computer screen displaying Exhibit One of Operation Ore. In the middle of the screen were the words 'Click Here CHILD PORN'.
According to witness statements sworn by the US detective Steven Nelson and US Postal Inspector Michael Mead, this was the front page of Landslide Productions Inc, a company at the centre of child porn allegations. To go further, they testified, those prosecuted must have clicked on 'Enter'. They would then be taken to a page that proclaimed itself as 'the most controversial site on the Web ... no legal content ... phedophilias [sic]... all sick, all sex maniacs'. Click on and they would be taken to 'Lolita World', and from there, said Nelson, to a host of child porn websites offered by Keyz, a separate service offered by Landslide.
The Metropolitan Police Paedophile Unit let the BBC cameras in on the planning process for Operation Ore raids for a series shown a year ago: 'Police Protecting Children'. At the start of the show was a PowerPoint briefing for the raiding teams. Slide 1 showed the 'Click here' banner, with the legend 'First they are into an adult site. And choose to go to a child site'.
To British police and prosecutors, this was killer evidence. It meant everyone who had been to Landslide had knowingly chosen to access child porn. It meant that everyone who had subscribed to the site must automatically be guilty.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/74690/operation-ore-exposed.html
David Leppard
DOZENS of men accused of downloading child pornography from the internet may have been wrongly prosecuted, according to expert prosecution and defence witnesses.
New evidence suggests that Operation Ore, Britain’s biggest child pornography investigation, may have prosecuted innocent men on the basis of discredited American police testimony and questionable forensic methods.
Jim Bates, a computer expert who has served as a witness for the prosecution or the defence in more than 100 child porn cases, says many Ore cases are now likely to collapse or be overturned in the Court of Appeal. “It has been a shambles from the word go,” he said.
The nationwide police investigation was launched three years ago after a list of 7,200 British suspects was supplied to British police by American authorities.
The men on the list stand accused of having used their credit cards to pay for child porn through Landslide, a sex website that operated in Texas from 1996-9.
The accusations have led to 33 suicides, most recently that of Commodore David White, the commander of British forces in Gibraltar. He was found dead in his swimming pool on January 8.
Bates believes records of credit card transactions on the site are unreliable and therefore the names of alleged subscribers cannot be used as evidence.
Thomas Reedy, the man who set up the website, was investigated by the FBI in the 1990s for credit card fraud. “I am convinced that a massive fraud has been perpetrated at Landslide and an unknown number of subscriptions are fake,” said Bates.
He cites the case of Dr Paul Grout, a senior accident specialist at Hull Royal Infirmary, who was falsely accused of accessing child porn. Grout, who was praised for his help at the 2001 Selby rail crash, lost his £70,000-a-year job because of the allegations. Many of his friends “drifted off” and he and his wife Susie endured huge strains on their marriage.
It was not until his case came to Hull crown court in April last year that the Yorkshire doctor was able to prove his innocence. His lawyers showed that, while Grout had used his credit card to pay for a meal in a restaurant in Yorkshire, someone else had been using it 5,000 miles away in Lake Tahoe, America.
In a case that legal experts believe may prove a landmark judgment, Judge David Bentley threw out the prosecution argument. In his judgment, Bentley dismissed some police evidence as “utter nonsense”. He said the way the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) had held back some information vital to Grout’s defence had “stunk of unfairness”.
Another computer user wrongly accused of downloading child pornography was Robert Del Naja, frontman of the group Massive Attack. His arrest in February 2003 was leaked to the media but the case against him was dropped less than a month later.
One police officer, Peter Johnston, became so disillusioned at what he described as the Ore “witch-hunt” that he resigned from his job with Merseyside police.
In a letter to The Sunday Times, Johnston said: “I began to doubt the validity of the evidence surrounding the circumstances of the initial investigation in America . . . I found it difficult to rationalise how offenders had been identified solely on a credit card number.”
Bates believes that evidence, highlighted by Duncan Campbell, an investigative journalist and an expert witness in some Ore cases, could lead to many cases being dropped.
In an article in last week’s Sunday Times, Campbell revealed that sworn statements provided in British courts by two American detectives who initiated Operation Ore could no longer be relied upon.
The two, Dallas detective Steve Nelson and US postal inspector Michael Mead, had claimed that everyone who went to Landslide always did so through a front-page screen button saying “Click Here (for) Child Porn”.
But Campbell has established that the button was never on the website’s front page. Instead it was on an advertisement for another website buried deep in the Landslide website.
That discovery has effectively removed a key plank of many of the Ore prosecutions where no actual child porn was found.
Those prosecutions were based on the assertion that evidence that someone had paid to access Landslide automatically meant that they had paid to access child porn.
Steve Barker, a solicitor who acts for one Operation Ore suspect in a High Court appeal, said that in many prosecutions police were unable to disprove defendants had simply accessed legal adult porn rather than paedophile material. In other cases, child porn might have been accessed accidentally by those looking for adult porn.
The CPS has also disclosed that an internal inquiry has raised serious questions over the evidence provided by Brian Underhill, a key police witness in some 600 Ore cases. The CPS said it would now disclose the doubts raised by its inquiry to defence solicitors before future trials began.
The CPS last week defended its role in the hundreds of successful cases in which defendants had pleaded guilty. A spokeswoman said: “Each case was considered on its own merits and the evidence provided by police has been subject to thorough scrutiny.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-523-1678810-523,00.html
Operation Ore is the UK's biggest ever IT crime investigation, but expert witness Duncan Campbell reveals that many prosecutions were founded on falsehoods
They arrive without warning at six in the morning. Drowsily rising, Adam Smith finds two polite, suited men. 'Police. May we come in?'
The scene starts to shift. 'I am arresting you on suspicion of possessing and distributing child pornography. We have a search warrant.' Behind their backs, Smith sees a flurry of others moving in. They are firm but not aggressive - they know they are dealing with a middle-class, educated professional with no criminal history.
A female officer corners his wife and asks her if she knew her husband was a paedophile. Would she please make up an excuse for the kids not going to school today? A family social worker will be coming over to interview them - in case her husband has been abusing his own children.
Politeness is maintained at the police station. Booked in, interviewed. They ask him to confirm his credit card number and the email addresses he used in 1999. They show him a copy of a credit card bill they have already got from his bank. They point to a payment to Landslide Productions. 'You paid for child pornography; that's what that is.' He says 'no' and that he's never heard of that company.
The facts they put so confidently seem to fit, except that Smith has never had any interest in children other than being a good dad.
In one day, for no cause he can understand, Smith has become a pariah, one of the most hated, baited people in the country, a suspected child-molesting paedophile. In the months ahead, it will only get worse.
Even if his computer is eventually found
ADVERTISEMENT
to contain nothing more sexually unusual than the proportions of Samantha Fox, he faces months of fearing trial, stigma and possible jail, accused merely of 'inciting' the sale of child porn, based solely on computer data found years ago in a Texas office block.
Mass arrests
Operation Ore launched on British TV screens on 20 May 2002. The BBC led on 'mass arrests over online child porn'. Thirty-six people were arrested, with promises of thousands more to follow. It made for compelling television, and provoked a rash of tabloid activity, but it also led to increased pressure on the police to bring the remaining thousands to justice.
Unfortunately, not all the evidence presented was quite as clear cut as it seemed. Clearly visible on the bulletin was a computer screen displaying Exhibit One of Operation Ore. In the middle of the screen were the words 'Click Here CHILD PORN'.
According to witness statements sworn by the US detective Steven Nelson and US Postal Inspector Michael Mead, this was the front page of Landslide Productions Inc, a company at the centre of child porn allegations. To go further, they testified, those prosecuted must have clicked on 'Enter'. They would then be taken to a page that proclaimed itself as 'the most controversial site on the Web ... no legal content ... phedophilias [sic]... all sick, all sex maniacs'. Click on and they would be taken to 'Lolita World', and from there, said Nelson, to a host of child porn websites offered by Keyz, a separate service offered by Landslide.
The Metropolitan Police Paedophile Unit let the BBC cameras in on the planning process for Operation Ore raids for a series shown a year ago: 'Police Protecting Children'. At the start of the show was a PowerPoint briefing for the raiding teams. Slide 1 showed the 'Click here' banner, with the legend 'First they are into an adult site. And choose to go to a child site'.
To British police and prosecutors, this was killer evidence. It meant everyone who had been to Landslide had knowingly chosen to access child porn. It meant that everyone who had subscribed to the site must automatically be guilty.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/74690/operation-ore-exposed.html
RE: Attack on children sh
I agree with you whole heartedly. And you may be in high school but you are certainly more intelligent than the majority on this forum.
I hate the pessimism that has ran its way through our society. Everyone complains and yet, no one acts upon their irritation. It's absolutely sickening.
And fiveparadox, I'm going to be one of those hands as well.
And jersay ignore that article, let's kill them anyway.
I agree with you whole heartedly. And you may be in high school but you are certainly more intelligent than the majority on this forum.
I hate the pessimism that has ran its way through our society. Everyone complains and yet, no one acts upon their irritation. It's absolutely sickening.
And fiveparadox, I'm going to be one of those hands as well.
And jersay ignore that article, let's kill them anyway.
I agree, Orpheus, that clarification is required here. I am discussing the very high risk violent offenders, who have raped, physically harmed or killed children. Studies on recidivism rates are contentious, due to differing definitions, level of followup surveillance, and underreporting of subsequent events. (Assessing treatment efficacy in outcome studies of sex offenders. Journal of interpersonal Violence, 8, 512-523, Quinsey et al ) I dont feel that the risk to society from these individuals is acceptable.
It seems to be headed that way orpheus, why don't some of these people come out and say, why do we need judges at all.
Who ever the police arrest must be quilty so lets kill them.
Who ever the police arrest must be quilty so lets kill them.
In my opinion, if I were the one drafting the legislation to be used for the administration of justice, I would be far more inclined to legislate based on risk, rather than revenge. Someone who commits tax evasion, or fraud, should never be imprisoned, in my opinion — it is a waste of resources, and serves no purpose whatsoever.
Now, where crimes are committed that relate to violence against a person or living creature, then that is where imprisonment should be considered — we should imprison those who pose a threat to society and, for that reason, would need to be quarantined from the population. Other than imprisoning those who pose a tangible risk to society, imprisonment becomes no more than a waste of resources, and an empty effort to quench the human desire for revenge.
Now, where crimes are committed that relate to violence against a person or living creature, then that is where imprisonment should be considered — we should imprison those who pose a threat to society and, for that reason, would need to be quarantined from the population. Other than imprisoning those who pose a tangible risk to society, imprisonment becomes no more than a waste of resources, and an empty effort to quench the human desire for revenge.
RE: Attack on children sh
And indeed, when someone has killed someone, the charges against this person would change significantly. However, the majority of these men are looking at child pornography. They haven't molested or killed anyone. It is then logical to think that their sentancing would be more relaxed then someone in charge, for example, organizing the creation of this porn. And even then, every case must be analyzed individually. It is not just if you determine the outcome of a trial on crimes others have committed.
And indeed, when someone has killed someone, the charges against this person would change significantly. However, the majority of these men are looking at child pornography. They haven't molested or killed anyone. It is then logical to think that their sentancing would be more relaxed then someone in charge, for example, organizing the creation of this porn. And even then, every case must be analyzed individually. It is not just if you determine the outcome of a trial on crimes others have committed.
I dare to ask questions. Haha.
Jersay said:
Any person who rapes and Murders a Child deserves the Death Penalty. I would infact have no problem pushing the button that would deliver the cocktail IV into the Arm of the Murderer who raped and killed Punky.
As for those who would committ molestation on a Child throw them into General Population.