Agencies see cases on luring kids rise
Posted on Sunday, May 25, 2008
A nationwide effort that has been afoot for two years to catch child predators who exploit children by either soliciting them for sex or distributing obscene images of them is just now making its presence felt in federal courtrooms across the country, including those in the Eastern and Western districts of Arkansas.
“We are definitely seeing a surge in these cases, and it has to do with the Project Safe Childhood Initiative,” said Jane Duke, U. S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas.
Duke was referring primarily to child-enticement cases, those in which someone is accused of using the Internet to lure a young person into meeting for sex, whether the victim is an actual teen or a persona created by a police officer manning a keyboard.
Duke’s counterpart in the Western District, U. S. Attorney Bob Balfe, says that in his jurisdiction, “What we’re seeing is a dramatic increase in childpornography cases.” Both types of cases fall under the realm of child sexualexploitation crimes, which are the emphasis of the initiative that began on Feb. 15, 2006, under then-U. S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
The initiative called for federal prosecutors and federal agents to team with local and state law enforcement officers to put together as many resources as possible to tackle a problem viewed as spiraling out of control.
It dissolved the usual lines of separation between the police agencies, linking the manpower supplied by local agencies with the power of the federal government to put a dent in the proliferation of activities seen as harmful to children.
By all accounts, it’s working. The initiative has coughed up a lot more federal defendants accused of sexually exploiting children than ever before.
Balfe said that in 2007, his office saw a 500 percent increase in the annual number of childexploitation cases referred to federal law enforcement by other police agencies. His prosecutors took on 11 referred exploitation cases in 2004, and last year handled 55 of them.
Meanwhile, indictments for exploitation crimes have increased in the Western District from five in 2004 to 45 in 2007, while convictions went from two in 2004 to 28 in 2007, with many of the suspects indicted in 2007 still waiting to be tried.
“We are seeing almost a 1, 000-fold increase in indictments since 2004,” Balfe said, crediting the Safe Childhood Initiative.
In addition to more charges being filed, prosecutors are expecting more jury trials in enticement cases, and thus more public exposure of the lurid exchanges between predator and prey, as a result of complementary legislation, known as the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, which took effect July 27, 2006.
The act established a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years in prison for child enticement.
Previously, the crime was punishable by a mandatory fiveyear minimum sentence, which was closer to penalty ranges suggested by federal sentencing guidelines.
The guidelines, which federal judges must consider at sentencing, take into account individual circumstances and the defendant’s criminal record in establishing a penalty range. They also generally allow lower sentences for people who save courts time and money by pleading guilty instead of taking their cases before juries.
But federal statutes trump the guidelines, so when the mandatory statutory minimum is higher than any range recommended by the guidelines, the mandatory minimum applies. That negates the previous advantage federal defendants had by pleading guilty to child-enticement charges, prompting many to opt to take their chances before a jury.
“They’ve got nothing to lose,” Duke said.
She said child-exploitation defendants can’t count on trying to negotiate a guilty plea to a lesser crime in exchange for the enticement charge being dropped, because of a directive known as the Ashcroft Memo.
Although it was a directive from John Ashcroft, who hasn’t been the U. S. Attorney General for more than three years, the directive remains in effect.
Under it, Duke explained, “We are required to plead defendants to the most readily provable offense with the most stringent penalty.” So, absent extenuating circumstances, a defendant whose enticing e-mails led to a search that uncovered child pornography on his computer can’t negotiate a plea to possession of child pornography, where there is no mandatory 10-year sentence, in exchange for the enticement charge being dropped.
“These are the types of cases where we want to see the toughest penalties anyway, because these are egregious crimes,” Duke said.
While mandatory minimums are called unfair by some advocates for the accused, they make federal prosecution even more attractive to local and state lawenforcement officers, who can now develop cases that will result in prison time in a federal institution, where parole isn’t an option and a 10-year sentence is just that.
Before the Project Safe Childhood Initiative, these officers would have been more likely to see their cases resolved in state courts, where offenders are often paroled after serving a fraction of their sentences, while federal prosecutors were more likely to handle only the sexual-exploitation cases developed by federal officers, such as FBI agents.
“I think it makes a world of difference,” said North Little Rock Police Chief Danny Bradley, referring to the multiagency collaboration in child-exploitation crimes.
“The federal prosecution is very important, because a lot of the cases we’ve had stretched across state lines, and for those you need federal search warrants. It would be very difficult without the federal prosecutors being so willing to help. My own opinion is that the federal courts have taken a much more serious view of these offenses, and the federal statutes are more appropriate. The federal law is better designed for these offenses than the state law.” He added, “The officers feel like if they get it in federal court, where caseloads are smaller and the prosecutors are very experienced, they’re going to get a better result. Also, in federal court if you get five years, that doesn’t mean one year.” Seven or eight years ago, North Little Rock operated the first Internet-sting operation in Arkansas, where officers posed as young girls in chat rooms and waited to be “hit on” by older men.
As in the enticement cases now being investigated by local and federal agencies all across the country, a predator would be arrested upon taking the online flirtation to the point of enticement — arranging to meet the “child” for sex, only to be greeted at the designated meeting place by police officers.
At the time that the North Little Rock Police Department was leading the effort in Arkansas, only a handful of similar operations were under way in other parts of the country.
“We made scores of arrests, and we felt like it was very important at the time, but now a number of agencies in Arkansas are doing it, and the responsibility is more spread out, as it should be, so we don’t do as many,” Bradley said.
Information wasn’t readily available on the exact number of police agencies in the state now involved in Internet-sting operations to capture child exploiters, but Duke said the number grows all the time.
To assist the wave of exploitation prosecutions, the federal government recently installed 46 new federal prosecutors across the country, including one in Arkansas’ Western District.
The Eastern District didn’t get an extra position but already devotes three prosecutors to the effort, Duke said.
She noted that a lot of enticement and pornography cases are intertwined, because often an Internet chatroom conversation monitored by police will lead to a search warrant on a suspect’s computer, which will reveal child pornography.
While the Eastern District has seen more enticement cases in particular, as a result of officers like Shannon Hills Police Chief Richard Friend lurking for hours in Internet chat rooms, Balfe said his district’s concentration has been on pornography cases, because those are less labor-intensive and easier for most departments to handle.
Balfe said he regards child pornography cases as just as bad as enticement cases.
“Statistics show that 85 percent of people we prosecute for child pornography are also child molesters, so these are not just people looking at photos,” Balfe said. He said the proliferation of photographs involving children involved in sexually explicit conduct also “creates a market for people who exploit children.” “They feed off each other,” he said of molesters and pornographers. “One of the strongest reasons we go after this is that the child molester and the child pornographer are often one and the same person. There’s a reason they look at this stuff.” He noted that many people think of child pornography as photos of a 15-year-old girl in a skimpy bathing suit, but actually, “We’re talking about images of children in horrific activities.” Citing national statistics, he said that 83 percent of child-pornography cases involve children between the ages of 6 and 12, while 40 percent involve images of children ages 3 to 5, and 19 percent involve children ages 2 and younger.
“These are not borderline cases where you have to ask, ‘Does she look 18 ?’ These are children. We in the public don’t visualize it because we don’t think that way. We think it’s almost like bad adult pornography. But if people could see these images, it’s often children being tortured, not children being put in suggestive poses.” Balfe noted that his office is steadily finding more pornographic videos of children, as opposed to still photographs. He said he’ll never forget a video in which he could see the fear in the eyes of a 7-year-old boy, his trophies and school certificates displayed on a wall behind him, as it came time for him to participate in a regular bout of pornography production.
Balfe said his office sends all child-pornography photos found on defendants’ computers to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, where teams of reviewers study clues in the background, such as the boy’s trophies, to try to determine a victim’s whereabouts and, from there, determine their identity and rescue them.
While some such children have been pinpointed and rescued, Balfe said that sadly, “They have even seen children grow up in these images. They’ve seen the same child getting older and older,” as newer pornographic images and videos appear.
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