With a child porn case against a former school coach hitting its second year, his attorneys are challenging Minnesota's child porn law as unconstitutional, on grounds that the law is so similar to the invalidated Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 that it, too, should be ruled invalid.
Randall Walter Wait's attorneys made their arguments June 5 before Winona District Judge Jeffrey Thompson, according to the Winona Daily News. Thompson scheduled a July 19 hearing date, where the defense will also challenge the search that produced the evidence against Wait.
Police recovered images of naked pre-pubescent and "barely pubescent" girls from Wait's home June 14, 2002, after obtaining a search warrant, the News said. Those warrants, the paper continued, came after parents complained about possible inappropriate contact between Wait and their daughters.
Winona County Attorney Chuck MacLean maintains the Supreme Court's shootdown of the CPPA didn't invalidate the entire act, only certain portions of it – specifically, its coverage of sexually explicit material involving computer-generated images, adults posing as minors, or ads claiming to show sexually-explicit minors where no minors were in fact involved in the product.
Minnesota's child porn law also bars making and selling obscene material involving minors, which McLean said would make the law constitutional under the coordinates of the Supreme Court ruling, the News said. McLean also said Wait's material did involve actual children. "We know who they are," he told the paper. "They have been identified."
