CON: Sandefur's child-pornography opinions worse than you've heard

You’ve likely heard the new campaign ad highlighting the sentencing record of Judge Dirk Sandefur, candidate for Montana Supreme Court, regarding child pornography cases. But unlike many 30-second attack ads that are little more than cheap shots, this one doesn’t go far enough. Sandefur’s views are actually worse than what the ad implies.

At a sentencing hearing in a child pornography case in January of this year, Sandefur did not impose any actual prison time — only a suspended sentence. His reasoning was shocking: Prosecutors “presented no evidence indicating that this Defendant in particular, or possessors of child pornography in general, pose any significant risk of actual physical victimization by the Defendant of children or others in this community.”

Sandefur’s attitude appears to be that possession of child pornography in general presents little threat to the community and thus warrants no prison time. This shocking attitude ignores several dangers.

First, even “simple” possession of child pornography psychologically victimizes children. In her testimony to the U.S. Sentencing Commission in 2012, U.S. District Judge Micaela Alvarez explained a basic fact that Sandefur apparently doesn’t grasp: “even simple possession of child pornography” could not have been engaged in “without some child having been somewhere abused by some adult.” And every new possession of child pornography is a new psychological victimization of a child who has been previously abused.

Second, Sandefur is dead wrong about “possessors of child pornography in general” not causing “actual physical victimization of children.” In its 2012 Report to Congress, the U.S. Sentencing Commission observed that “all child pornography offenses, including the simple possession of child pornography, are extremely serious.” One of many reasons for this, as the commission explained, is that “the ready availability of child pornography on the Internet, the existence of online child pornography ‘communities’ that validate child sexual exploitation, and a growing but largely non-commercial ‘market’ for new images all contribute to the further production of child pornography and, in the process, to the sexual abuse of children.”

That’s a fancy way of saying that child pornography customers create a demand for new supplies of child pornography — and all of the physical victimization, child trafficking, kidnapping, and humiliation inherent in creating those new supplies. This is why federal courts impose actual confinement in 98.2 percent of convictions for “simple” possession of child pornography, sentences that average nearly eight years in length.

Any judge like Sandefur who cannot recognize the obvious dangers created by possession of child pornography shouldn’t be sitting on the Montana Supreme Court.

Monforton is a Bozeman-based attorney and a graduate of Flathead High School.