Some people accused of the crime have managed to come off with much lighter sentences by accepting plea bargains.  A policeman charged with 32 counts of possession of child pornography had accepted a proffered sentence of 6 years, by agreeing to plead guilty.  Five others were sentenced to mere probation.  Eight cases were dismissed because of constitutional questions.  However, on the other end of the spectrum, in 1999, Arthur Stanley Jones was sentenced to 408 years for downloading 17 pictures, which amounts to 24 years per picture.

Berger too was made an offer in plea bargaining, but his offer was 17 to 39 years, which would have kept him in prison till the age of 68 to 90, so he decided to fight.  But he lost on a grand scale.

Berger appealed his conviction to the US Supreme Court, which refused on February 27 to hear the case, giving no reason for their refusal.

According to Carol Berger, Berger’s 35-year-old wife, no one ever complained that her husband had violated or touched any children.  She was shocked to learn that her husband had been amassing a collection of child pornography, and even more shocked that her husband had been handed such an outrageous sentence.

Whereas for second-degree murder he would have been sentenced to between 10 and 22 years, for the mere crime of sitting at his computer and looking at dirty pictures of children, without acting upon them in any way, he has been sentenced to 200 years.  This is utterly ridiculous and preposterous.

The prosecution argued that people like Berger create a market that is satisfied by people who do expose children to revolting sexual acts, and there is some sense in that line of argument I suppose, but the greatest likelihood is that the pictures all preexisted Berger’s downloading sprees.  He may not have helped create a market so much as availed himself of a market that was already in place. 

Further, the prosecution avers that statistics show that the majority of offenders convicted for child molestation have been found also to have collected child pornography.  Probably most homicides are committed by gun-owners, but that doesn’t mean gun-owners should all go to prison.

I’m not saying that Berger should go free, and of course I don’t know all the facts of the case, but this sounds something like invasion of privacy to me.  I’d hate to think that I could be tried, convicted and imprisoned on grounds of having impermissible sexual fantasies.  I do have them, I won’t deny, but I never act upon them.

Surely a sentence of 3 to 5 years would have been more than enough, especially in view of the fact that others have walked for doing exactly the same thing.  Talk about equal justice under law.

Articles about the case may be read here and here. 

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