Experts track down child porn

Each week, about 100,000 sexually explicit images of children arrive on CDs or portable disk drives at Michelle Collins’ office.

They are sent by police and prosecutors who hope Collins and her 11 analysts at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children can verify that the graphic pictures are real, not computer-generated. When they can’t, officials sometimes turn to outside experts.

All this is being done – at a cost in the millions of dollars collectively in child-pornography cases alone – as software like Photoshop makes it easier to fake photos and as juries become more skeptical about what they see.

Although challenges to digital photos come in all types of criminal and civil cases, they are especially pronounced in child-pornography cases because of a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down a ban on computer-generated child pornography. Defense attorneys are trying to use the ruling to introduce reasonable doubt in jurors’ minds about the images’ authenticity.

Prosecutors still generally prevail, but “this has certainly created an additional burden,” said Thomas Kerle of the Massachusetts State Police. “I can say that unequivocally, it has made the prosecution of these types of cases more difficult.”

Drew Oosterbaan, who heads the U.S. Department of Justice’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, said prosecutors sometimes submit only photos they can easily verify because outside experts can be expensive – with travel, hotels and consulting fees, along with possible delays.

“This can affect the sentence the defendant gets,” he said. “Before (the 2002 ruling) we would generally charge all the images.”

Child pornography is illegal in the United States, but the Supreme Court in 2002 struck down on free-speech grounds a 1996 federal ban on material that “appears to be” a child in a sexually explicit situation.

Collins’ Child Victim Identification Program in Alexandria, Va., grew out of that ruling. After officials submit seized photos, the center uses software and visual inspections to look for matches. It can usually verify that children in some or all of the images are known and real.

The program, which costs about $1 million a year to run, now has about 1,300 children in its database, up from 20 in 2002. Staff grew from just Collins then to 11 full-time analysts who now work under her. The program reviewed 5 million images last year, up from about 450,000 in 2003, the program’s first full year.

Because of the graphic nature of the images, a psychologist visits each week, and analysts must undergo counseling at least quarterly.

“Not everybody can do it,” said Raymond Smith, a longtime investigator who oversees child-exploitation cases at the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. “You have to be able to come to grips with seeing children be victimized and abused. It can tear you up, (but) through your efforts you are identifying the people that hurt these children.”

When the center cannot make a match, prosecutors can turn to outside experts. Sometimes, it’s a pediatrician who can say a real child has characteristics matching those seen in the photo. Other times it’s a computer expert who can talk about how difficult it is to produce images and video of that quality.

Even when there is a match and an expert isn’t needed, a prosecutor must seek out the detective who initially identified a child for the center. That detective must often be flown in and be ready to testify if the defense raises a challenge. In one case in Portland, Maine, a Russian detective couldn’t be reached, so the prosecutor had to spend $5,000 on an expert anyway.

Sam Guiberson, a defense attorney who specializes in technology and digital evidence, said challenges to evidence are to be expected, digital or not.

“Every good trial lawyer is always going to subject every part of his adversary’s exhibits to that sort of scrutiny,” Guiberson said.

How much proof a prosecutor needs can vary from region to region and even from judge to judge. Recent federal appellate rulings have eased the burden on prosecutors, essentially saying that in lieu of definitive evidence, they can let jurors make up their own minds about whether an image is real or computer-generated.

Many prosecutors, though, don’t want to take that chance and would rather submit proof.

“It’s difficult to prove these are real children,” said Mary Leary, a Catholic University law professor who previously worked on child-abuse and child-pornography cases. “Is the defense exploiting this? Absolutely they are.”