Linn Detectives Arrest Man for Distributing Child Pornography

I am the sister that the previous commenter spoke of. The man in the article is my ex and, while I'm certainly not carrying a torch for him (I'm the one who did the dumping, over two years ago), I'm inclined to believe that he is innocent. Obviously he would not have been arrested had the material not indeed been on his computer, but without knowing more facts than this, my first thought would be that he was *unaware* of this material being on his computer. He is remarkably computer illiterate and gets viruses all the time; I would have to guess that he either got some sort of trojan download, or else the material was mislabeled. That is to say, maybe he had pictures of like a 14-16 year old that was labeled as 18, and the police were able to determine the origins were of minors even though the version he had was labeled "barely legal" or something like that. Don't get me wrong, if he actually did this knowingly then he deserves everything he gets. I'm just saying that until more facts are presented, everyone shouldn't be so quick to say "he had pics of eight-year-olds getting raped and sent them to other people via an instant messenger or posting them on his own website!" when it may very well end up being "he had pics of teens who were technically minors yet looked and were labeled as 18+, and they were 'distributed' via being in his shared Kazaa/Napster/whatever folder when he wasn't even aware of them'. I don't use file sharing programs, but I know a lot of people who do, and I know that people who use them for porn specifically often end up downloading huge .zip files of tons of pictures when they were only interested in a specific few, don't even know what the other 80% of the crap in there is, and never bother to move it from the "Shared" folder where it originally lands. I may end up looking the fool for defending this man, but from what I know of him he's just not the sort to do this intentionally, but he *is* computer-retarded enough to end up with something like this *UN*intentionally. As my brother noted, this man's brother HAS been in trouble for something similar, and rather than say "it runs in the family" I would think that experience would make him MORE gun-shy of this type of thing and that he wouldn't have done something like this if he were actually aware of it.

I know this guy, he's my sister's ex. His brother went away for fooling around with a minor some time ago. I guess it runs in the family. Hopefully it doesn't run TOO far in the family, but at least the adoptive mother of his and my sister's kid has been made aware to keep an eye out.