A California judge whose bench career was wrecked on a child porn charge could be catching a huge break, if the evidence a British Columbian teenager got against him by way of computer hacking gets hacked right out of the case in the wake of a U.S. appeals court ruling.
The hacker, Brad Willman, wrote a Trojan horse program disguised as a porn image while still a teen living home, the Vancouver Sun reported, letting him into the computers of child porn newsgroup members who downloaded the program. One of those computers belonged to Orange County Superior Court Judge Ronald C. Kline, from whom Williams picked up diary entries and other materials which he fed to authorities, leading to a federal Customs raid on his home in late 2001.
The raid turned up computer images of boys in sex acts, and Kline was arrested. But an appeals court has ruled Willman was behaving like a police informant in hacking into Kline's computer and, therefore, had to abide by the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment protection against "unreasonable" search and seizure without due process - especially since police "rewarded him in other ways," as the Sun described it...including not prosecuting him.
Kline was arrested as he was beginning a re-election campaign to the Superior Court bench. He withdrew his bid after his arrest, though he has pleaded innocent to all charges against him.
