Patrick Naughton \nLOS ANGELES - Internet pioneer and former Infoseek and Disney executive Patrick Naughton has been convicted of possessing child pornography, but the jury hung on whether the fallen 34-year-old wunderkind was guilty of crossing state lines for sex with a 13-year-old girl he met online - and who turned out to be an undercover investigator.
Federal judge Edward Rafeedie declared a mistrial on the underage sex case. But Naughton faces sentencing March 5 and could receive up to ten years in prison on the child porn conviction. He could have received up to 40 years if convicted on the other charges. His $100,000 bail was revoked upon the child porn verdict and he was taken away from court in handcuffs, according to APBNews.
Naughton maintained throughout the case that his erotic online conversations with whom he thought was a 13-year-old girl were only fantasy, a way to relieve the stress of his high-tech, high-powered working life. He also testified he had suspected the girl was actually an adult. He had headed the Walt Disney Company's GO Network Internet portal when he was arrested.
Prosecutors maintained Naughton went from his Seattle home to San Jose on business and then to Los Angeles for a Disney meeting, going that night to the Santa Monica Pier for a rendezvous with "KrisLA," who turned out to be a 28-year-old Los Angeles Sheriff's investigator named Amber Braaten. Online, "KrisLA" was actually an FBI agent posing. Dressed to resemble a teenager, Braaten helpd arrest Naughton, Reuters says, after he identified himself and suggested the two take separate paths to the beach.
Naughton hung his defense entirely on the supposedly tricky distinction between the fantasy worlds of the Internet and the real world.
The case stunned Internet observers who knew Naughton was one of the leading lights of cyberspace. He was famous, in fact, for his work on the Java computer programming language while he worked for Sun Microsystems. But his arrest brought renewed heat to Disney, which had purchased Infoseek in 1998 and was already under periodic fire for its ownership or distributorship of some of television's and films' more racy fare.
Attorneys in the case are scheduled to hold a status conference Jan. 5 to determine whether Naughton will be tried again on the underage sex charges. And it's not yet known whether he'll pursue any action against the Disney Company regarding his firing, which cost him over one million dollars in stock options.
