AZ Court of Appeals: Downloading child porn constitutes “duplicating” rather than “receiving”
Arizona v. Windsor, No. 2 CA-CR 2009-0090, 2010 WL 1215064 (Ariz. App. Div. 2, March 30, 2010)
Remote downloading of child pornography constitutes “duplication” rather than “receiving.”
At issue in this case is “whether downloading images from a remote source through the Internet constitutes ‘duplicating,’ as opposed to ‘receiving,’ these images for purposes of Arizona’s sexual exploitation of children statutes.” Paul David Windsor was convicted of five counts of sexual exploitation of a minor under A.R.S. § 13-3553(A)(1). On appeal he “contends that his downloading [child pornography] did not amount to ‘[r]ecording, filming, photographing, developing, or duplicating’ them.”
According to the court “the validity of his conviction turns on whether downloading pictures from a remote Internet site constitutes ‘duplicati[on]‘ for the purposes of this statute.” The statute in question criminalizes “[r]ecording, filming, photographing, developing or duplicating any visual depiction in which a minor is engaged in exploitive exhibition or other sexual conduct.” Windsor argues that duplicating “refers to the creation or production of a new image” and that “the act of downloading is more analogous to the receipt or distribution” than to duplication or creation. The Court of Appeals (Espinosa presiding) disagreed:
[B]ecause the state presented evidence that, by downloading these images, Windsor intentionally had copied them onto the computer, his conviction for duplicating an exploitative visual representation of a child in violation of § 13-3553(A)(1) was supported by substantial evidence.
COMMENTS
