An article “Life Sentence for Possession of Child Pornography Spurs Debate Over Severity” asks:
“Does downloading child pornography from the Internet deserve the same criminal punishment as first-degree murder?
“A circuit court judge in Florida clearly thinks so: On Thursday, he sentenced Daniel Enrique Guevara Vilca, a 26-year-old stockroom worker whose home computer was found to contain hundreds of pornographic images of children, to life in prison without the possibility of parole.”
WATCHDOG: Both the judge and the offender need psychological counseling. The judge should resign or be removed from the bench and the offender should be given a year’s probation subject to counseling. We suspect the judge is the sicker of the two.
A contributor admonished the Watchdog some years ago that viewing child pornography encourages the maltreatment of children by those who post it. The writer contended this was not just punishing someone for what he or she thought.
But certainly the punishment should not be excessive and counseling would seem to be a better approach. Don’t we already have the highest incarceration rate in the world?
