According to a report, he was charged for possession of two dolls and charged for possession of two illegal images.
I have failed, so far, to find out what happened. The report I viewed doesn’t state that pictures were found.
This occurred on 1 December 2023, reportedly.
I have a PDF of a warrant that was released to the media.
Apparently, pdf files aren’t allowed.
I’m curious about this.
It’s likely that they have evidence of actual CSAM being distributed from online accounts that he owned. There’s simply nothing that can be done for him with regard to that if that’s the case (unless they can be dismissed on procedural grounds).
I wouldn’t want @prostasia to get involved in any legal defense which involves defending against actual CSAM possession unless doing so would be helpful in sentencing which promotes meaningful rehabilitation over inane punishment.
However, any charges related to the two dolls, those can (and likely will) get challenged as unconstitutional, and any reasonable judge will agree with that sentiment. The legal standing by which these laws are grounded on is spurious at best.
They’re not actually minors, there’s no ‘obscenity’ requirement, and I’m under the presumption that FL’s statutory history regarding the legal possession of sex toys is not as robust as its lawmakers would hope.
Additionally, no evidence, empirical or otherwise, exists to support the belief that these dolls are actually harmful, or that they promote or exacerbate risk of contact offense perpetration or CSAM consumption, and any anecdotes from LEO testimony are so few and far between that it’s impossible to call them representative.
@elliot we could probably contact his legal defense and see if they’d be willing to work with the ACLU or something, and we could contact them to see if they’d be willing to work.
Maybe I should have posted this link.
The report states this.
Detectives placed Houseman under arrest, charging him with possession of child pornography (two counts) and possession of a child-like sex doll (two counts)
Bond was set at $12,000.
The investigation is ongoing. Additional charges may be added at a later date.
Am I to assume that this “child porn” involves actual children and actual porn?
It looks like they counted the dolls as illegal images. This ain’t Australia. If such is the case, this may develop into a learning situation. It’s likely they ran a file carver on his devices. We will likely need information on the findings to get an idea on what to expect.
As Chie suggested, if the doll law is found illegal, they may have to suppress any evidence found. A motion to suppress evidence should be filed early on, so there are many ways this could go. I hope he’s clean, so this can go smoothly.
The law does mention that the doll must be obscene.
I wonder whether anyone explained that a doll cannot be found legally obscene.
Jenkins v. Georgia (1974).
[N]udity alone does not render material obscene under Miller’s standards.
In point of fact, a doll cannot meet anyone of the three prongs of the Miller test. You would be hard pressed to even say it violates the Dost test.
The DOST test is for images whose creation required the involvement of minors. Dolls are toys, not minors. A doll is not a product of abuse or exploitation any more than a stick figure is.
It’s odd that a law states it proscribes dolls that can be found obscene when it’s redundant to proscribe what can already be found obscene. Even this sentence looks odd.
The wiki states this.
However, because obscenity and child pornography are two distinct categories of speech, and child pornography is not required to be obscene, any relation to the Miller standard as applied to virtual/fictional child pornography is immaterial, as explained by Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition and United States v. Williams (2008).