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Porn police
Shamed & Named Documentary
Police across the country fight
a tireless battle against child pornography. And while they do
make dents in the trade of images of sexually exploited children,
their efforts have extracted a heavy cost from one family.
On April 16, 2003, the Toronto
Police held a news conference to announce the arrest of five
men on charges of child pornography. A warrant was sworn out
for a sixth. Names and ages were released for all of the suspects
as part of what's called Operation Snowball----Canada's biggest
investigation into child pornography on the Internet.
Media came out in droves.
One of the charged was a Toronto
man named James LeCraw. But after further investigation, charges
against him were withdrawn. But James Lecraw never recovered
from the stigma of being associated with such a horrific crime.
He lost his job. His friends. His reputation. And eventually
his will to live.
On July 19th, James LeCraw
killed himself. CBC Radio reporter Kellie Hudson has been investigating
the life and death of James LeCraw. She joined us from our studio
in Thunder Bay. (on
The Current, CBC)
The dark consequences
of naming and shaming
Globe and Mail editorial,
November 29, 2004
The arrests of James LeCraw
and several other Toronto men in a high-profile child-pornography
case in April, 2003, were big news. What happened to Mr. LeCraw
later was not. Therein lies a tragic tale that graphically illustrates
what can happen when police and prosecutors cross the line between
their desire to publicize their successes in the fight against
the most despicable of crimes and the individual's right to be
presumed innocent until proved guilty. It's also a cautionary
tale about the potential consequences when the media put the
public's need to know above the individual's right to privacy
and then fail to follow the story to its conclusion.
Mr. LeCraw and the other men
were arrested as part of Operation Snowball, the Canadian portion
of a major international investigation into persons using credit
cards to acquire child pornography over the Internet. Toronto
Police Chief Julian Fantino trumpeted the sweep at a press conference,
using the occasion to call for more government funding and tougher
laws to help stamp out the burgeoning illegal trade.
Chief Fantino was justified
in using such an occasion to make an important point about a
heinous crime. But he went further, using inflammatory language
to describe the actions of the accused, all of whom were named
and whose ages were provided. "They only have one thing
in common," he declared. "That is the criminal approach
to their relationship with children."
When the Crown subsequently
withdrew all charges against Mr. LeCraw, there was no fanfare.
In fact, there was not even a media release. By then, as CBC
Radio revealed in a poignant documentary last week, Mr. LeCraw
had become the victim. He lost his job as executive director
of a non-profit agency that provides computers to schools and
was unable to land another one. His friends shunned him and the
once outgoing man became withdrawn. This past July, he killed
himself, but not before leaving behind a letter accusing Chief
Fantino of issuing an irresponsible public statement that ruined
his life. He asked his family to seek the legal redress he himself
could not afford.
Police do not need to identify
those arrested to make their point that they are working hard
to suppress a horrible crime or that they need more ammunition
to win the battle. Even in major drug sweeps, the accused are
seldom named, although such information is publicly available.
Police and prosecutors need to take particular precautions when
the crime involves such dreadful consequences for the accused.
A month before he died, Mr.
LeCraw called for changes in the way people accused of particularly
offensive crimes are treated by the police and the media. He
told his brother that "there's no real innocence, just unproven
guilt."
That's not at all how our justice
system is supposed to function. Police, prosecutors and the media
should heed Mr. LeCraw's pleas for change. We need a system that
is as open and transparent as possible, one where the police
are not silenced or the media restrained. But they must exercise
good judgment. If they insist on publicizing the names of those
arrested, they must give equal weight to the dropping of charges
or to court acquittals. Society has a powerful interest in suppressing
child pornography, but not at the expense of destroying innocent
lives.
Porn charges can ruin
innocent lives
- `Once you're
charged, it's over'
- London
suicide triggers memories
BETSY POWELL CRIME REPORTER,
July 22, 2004
A 32-year-old London doctor's
suicide last weekend after he was charged with possessing child
pornography has sent shockwaves through that city and raised
questions about the way police and media handle the arrests of
people accused of lurid crimes.
When he heard about it, the
events of April 15, 2003, came flooding back to Toronto resident
James LeCraw. That was the day the 51-year-old man was charged
with possessing child pornography. The charges were withdrawn
last September.
He was asleep in his west-end
Toronto condo when five police officers banged on his door.
"There was something about
`You've been charged with child pornography.' It was all pretty
embarrassing and humiliating," LeCraw recalled.
The day before, he'd been "on
top of the world" after learning he was in line for a big
promotion at the non-profit agency he had successfully turned
around. "I was thinking, no matter how this goes, I'm screwed
now; once you're charged it's over."
The next day, Chief Julian
Fantino and Staff Inspector Bruce Smollet, head of the Toronto
Police Service sex crimes unit, held a news conference. Each
year, Toronto police arrest some 50,000 people, but only a small
fraction are singled out in news releases and conferences.
Those cases are highlighted
for many reasons, said Toronto police spokesperson Mark Pugash.
Police have "an obligation to public accountability, public
safety, for people to be aware of what law enforcement issues
are, about what is happening."
Pugash said the public also
wants to know what police are doing to deal with those issues.
News conferences can also encourage
other victims to come forward, Pugash said.
At the briefing, police released
the names and ages of six Toronto men, including LeCraw, arrested
as part of Project Snowball. "They only have one thing in
common," Fantino told reporters. "That is the criminal
approach to their relationship with children." He demanded
tougher prison terms and asked Ottawa for more money to combat
the victimizing of children.
The story received prominent
attention in the media. But five months later, the crown quietly
withdrew the charges against LeCraw. Crown Attorney Mary Humphrey
will say only that the decision was made for a variety of reasons.
Pugash, speaking "purely
hypothetically," said there are some situations where "the
crown may decide not to proceed with a case ... that does not
mean that the evidence wasn't there to charge."
In 2002-03, 303 charges of
possessing child porn were laid in Canada, not including Manitoba,
Northwest Territories and Nunavut, according to the Canadian
Centre for Justice Statistics. There was a 46.2 per cent conviction
rate, with 140 guilty verdicts, two acquittals, 123 charges stayed
or withdrawn, and 38 "other" dispositions.
LeCraw said he'd been on an
adult porn Web site owned by a company that also runs child pornography
sites. Police found his credit card number and used it to obtain
a search warrant. He said they searched his computer and found
four "pop-up" addresses of child porn sites and a barely
visible, tiny image police alleged to be child porn.
Ray Wyre, a leading independent
consultant on sex crimes in the United Kingdom, said in a recent
interview there are a host of ways people can unwittingly bring
illegal material into their computers. "The fact is that
you're only three clicks away."
Wyre, who works both for police
and for people accused of sex crimes - "I'm not a hired
gun for one side or the other" - says "it can come
in as a pop-up or a pop-under or possibly as a virus and there
are some trojans (computer programs) that have been bringing
this stuff in; or maybe somebody was on wife-swapping.com and
they got an attached document and they haven't asked for it,
and as soon as they saw it they deleted it."
He said the crackdown - the
same one that swept up LeCraw also netted rock legend Pete Townshend
- has created "problems ... throughout the world" because
police were obtaining warrants based on credit card information
without conducting more thorough investigations. Townshend, who
said he had looked at an image for research, paid a small fine.
Even though he was not convicted,
LeCraw feels he was punished. He lost his job, is still unemployed
and has taken a second mortgage on his condo. "With this
crime there is absolutely no assumption of innocence. I've lost
lifelong friends that, to their discredit ... didn't even make
a phone call to me, they just read it in the paper."
He has complained to the Ontario
Civilian Commission on Police Services and says he can't afford
to launch a lawsuit.
Bob Steele, a journalism ethics
professor at the Poynter Institute in Florida, said it would
be appropriate and "humane" if, when charges are withdrawn,
there is acknowledgement of that by police and the media. The
media have a "profound responsibility," he says, to
"make sure we have an exceptionally high level of fairness
to those who are accused in these cases, because they will be
tried by the public long before, sometimes, they're tried in
a courtroom."
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Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell