Should Have Got A Digital Camera
So I read this with some astonishment. A woman leaves in some photos for developing and among the four rools of typical family snaps there are several of her breastfeeding her baby, and some of naked toddlers playing. Photo technician calls the cops, couple gets arrested. Now, after many months, the charges of child pornography against them have been dropped but they have to attend sexual dysfunction counsellling and child welfare zealots are still keeping the toddlers in foster care, away from their parents.
The real issue here is the bizarre thought processes at work within the minds of the photo developing technician and some police, and the DA, who can look at toddlers at breastfeeding and derive sufficient sexual stimulation from their experience to judge the photos arousing. What is going on? The wrong people were sent for counselling, that’s for sure.
A half-dozen others recorded the kids at bath time. Fernandez took several photos of the boys “playing around,” naked and innocent, with the oldest flashing a big smile. Mercado, who says she often bathed with the kids, is in several of the shots unclothed from the waist up, holding her arm modestly across her bare chest. In one–the photo that would threaten to send Mercado and her boyfriend to prison–the infant Rodrigo is suckling her left breast. After Mercado dropped off the film for processing, a technician viewed the images and decided they were “suspicious,” according to a police report.
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To Richardson police, who arrived at the store that afternoon and apparently made up their minds from the content of the pictures alone, this was nothing short of a felony case of child pornography. “We thought they contained sexuality,” says Sergeant Danny Martin, a Richardson police spokesman, explaining why two Richardson police detectives began pursuing a criminal case. “If you saw the photos, you’d know what I mean.”With nothing else to support their contention that the photos were related to sex or sexual gratification, the police and the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office presented the photos to a grand jury in January and came away with indictments against Mercado and Fernandez for “sexual performance of a child,” a second-degree felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison. The charges centered on a single photo, the breast-feeding shot.