For the first time in months, something went Patrick Naughton's way - the federal judge who presided over his first trial has granted the former Infoseek executive a new one after setting aside his child pornography conviction based on an appellate ruling the day after his original conviction.
U.S. District Judge Edward Rafeedie said, however, that the conviction would be reinstated if there's any successful challenge to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeal's ruling before Naughton's new trial begins in March.
Naughton's first trial ended in a hung jury on two charges related to underage sex, but the same jury found him guilty of possessing child porn. When he was arrested in Santa Monica last September, his laptop computer had been seized and child porn images were found on it.
But the day after he was convicted, the 9th Circuit Court struck down as unconstitutional that portion of the federal Child Online Protection Act under which Naughton was convicted. And Naughton still faces retrial on the underage sex charges, which deadlocked his first jury.
Naughton's troubles began when he was arrested last September on the Santa Monica Pier, after going there from his Seattle home allegedly to meet and have sex with a 13-year-old girl known to him only as KrisLA. They'd met in an Internet chat room earlier in the year. But what Naughton didn't know was that online KrisLA was actually an FBI agent. And in Santa Monica, KrisLA turned out to be an undercover sheriff's deputy dressed to appear like a teenage girl. He was charged with using the Internet to arrange sex with a minor and for crossing state lines for that purpose.
The arrest shattered the 34-year-old computer legend's career - he was about to become a lead executive with the Disney Co., which was merging with Infoseek, and had earlier made his reputation for helping pioneer Java script at Sun Microsystems. Naughton was fired almost immediately after his arrest, which cost him $15 million in vested Disney stock.
At his first trial, his defense portrayed Naughton as a man so deeply entrenched in the high-tech executive's life that he sought stress relief by way of the Internet his work had so influenced. He claimed that he suspected KrisLA was actually an adult in role playing, just as he was. Earlier reports have suggested the defense will lean upon the same in his new trial.
That defense probably helped get him the hung jury on the underage sex charges. One juror even suggested later that law enforcement should have waited until Naughton did or didn't make an explicit move toward KrisLA in Santa Monica before arresting him.
The child porn conviction came just as the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals was about to rule on a case brought by the Free Speech Coalition arguing that porn images which only "appear to be" of minors - like computer-created images - are protected by the First Amendment. The 9th Circuit Court agreed, raising legal questions about Naughton's conviction because, as the San Jose Mercury News says, the jury was not asked to determine whether the images found on his computer were actual children.
During Naughton's trial, a prosecution witness testified three of the images fond on the seized laptop were real children. That was alluded to during Friday's hearing, with the original trial prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney Patricia Donohue, saying Naughton would be convicted anyway because those three were real children.
But Rafeedie granted the re-trial and threw out the original conviction because he hadn't instructed jurors to distinguish between real and computer-created images and couldn't be sure what they thought when they voted to convict, the Mercury News says.
