Internet Child Porn Puts Martinez Girls’ Soccer Coach in Federal Prison for 11 years
A former Wells Fargo vice president, Kenneth Gibson, was sentenced to 135 months by U.S. District Judge Martin Jenkins in an Oakland courtroom yesterday for exchanging more than 600 images of child porn over a two year period.
Gibson choked back tears and apologized to the court, after the judge said to him, “ . . . there are real children significantly impacted by this.” Gibson’s lawyer, Robert Beles, said, “You’ve basically got a good man who went into a fantasy world. Other than that, he’s never done anything wrong in his life. There is no indication his is a pedophile. [italics mine].”
Gibson’s lawyer said that his client is “still searching for reasons why he entered that subterranean, perverted world of child-porn Internet.”
This case (Kenneth Gibson) is another illustration that we have entered a new age of thought police. No harm to another person need be proven. All the government has to show is that a person’s thoughts and fantasies involve children and sex, and that person was on the Internet. This case is similar to one I had last year in Hayward where a middle-aged man merely LOOKED at pictures of young girls on files he had downloaded, for which he was charged with several felonies. In that case, the FBI electronically traced the gentleman back to his computer and turned the evidence over to the Alameda DA, who sent the sheriff to make the arrest.
Gibson got caught after police in Jackson, Tenn., investigating the theft of a convicted sex offender’s laptop computer, contacted the Tennessee task force for sex crimes. Gibson had traded sexual images of children with the sex offender.
Evidence discovered by police after the arrest included a picture of a child, bound at the knees and writs, performing oral sex, as well a letter in which Gibson wrote, in reference to his soccer coach activities, “ohhh year – five more months of 9 year-old girls.”
The rationale for treating Internet-related sex crimes differently than non-Internet sex crimes is addressed in an article at sexcrimescounsel.com discussing why you have fewer Constitutional rights, under both Federal and state constitutions, when you use a computer than when you do not. Compare what you are allowed to look at in a book without threat of arrest to the same thing on your computer.
