Judge Rules for Child Porn Collage

Citing the 2002 ruling of Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, the New Hampshire State Supreme Court ruled that sexual images a camp photographer created by combining the faces of teenage girls with women’s bodies are not child pornography.

This ruling overturned the child-pornography conviction of Marshal Zidel, who was sentenced in June 2006 to up to seven years in prison. Zidel, 61, of Somerville, Mass., was a photographer at Camp Young Judea in Amherst, where authorities say he superimposed pictures of 15-year-old girls onto images of naked adults.

The court ruled the pictures do not violate child pornography laws, partly because they did not involve sexual acts by actual children, and partly because they were not deliberately distributed. “When no part of the image is ‘the product of sexual abuse’ … and a person merely possesses the image, no demonstrable harm results to the child whose face is depicted in the image,” Associate Justice James Duggan wrote for the court.

The First Amendment Center has more on this story. For more on virtual child pornography, click here.