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<b><i>Commentary: </b></i>Just Looking: Should Internet Ignorance Be a Defense to Child Porn Charges?
Two appellate courts recently ruled that an individual who intentionally visited Web sites to view child pornography, but who did not intentionally save those images to his computer's hard drive, could not be convicted or punished for possessing images that were automatically saved due to the Web browser's cache functions. These rulings strike me as badly mistaken, for reasons that I shall explain further below.
The Diodoro Case
The first of these two rulings was issued on Nov. 2, 2006, by the Superior Court of Pennsylvania in a case captioned Commonwealth v. Diodoro, No. 1889 EDA 2005 (found at www.aopc.org/OpPosting/Superior/out/A23036_06.pdf). The defendant was convicted under a Pennsylvania statute that makes it a crime to 'knowingly possess' any photograph, computer depiction or other material depicting child pornography.
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