Emily Bazelon on Slate.com: Paying Amy – Child Pornography and Restitution

Emily Bazelon has written another great piece about our Supreme Court case which was posted today on Slate.com. In Paying Amy -Doyle Paroline owned two pornographic pictures of an 8-year-old girl. How much should he have to pay?, Bazelon explains:

Here’s the clearest way to think about how and why Amy and other victims like her should win restitution. Their trauma can’t be neatly parceled out among the individual men convicted for possessing their pictures. But the harm is crystal clear in the aggregate. And so Paroline and other defendants shouldn’t be relieved of their obligation to pay “simply because Amy would continue to suffer harm if there were one less child-pornography consumer in the world,” as the Department of Justice puts it. This makes sense to me: You can’t let each viewer off the hook because he is merely one small part of the whole.

Bazelon, who wrote this groundbreaking piece on my client in January for the New York Times Magazine, concludes “Congress was right to see the value of restitution. The Supreme Court should too..”

Read her entire article here at Slate.com.

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