New York Law School professor Edward Samuels was sentenced to six months behind bars June 23, with his sentence not beginning until October, the New York Post reported, saying child advocates were outraged by the light sentence for a man found with 150,000 child porn images including babies and dogs.
"This is not stamp-collecting - each of these images is a record of a criminal act," said Ruben Rodriguez of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to the Post. "Light sentences only encourage the continued production of these images."
Samuels, noted as a copyright law expert and himself the father of two, has maintained his collection hurt no one directly, and was free for the taking for anyone going on the Internet, the Post said. "Ninety-nine percent of what I downloaded was from newsgroups publicly available to anyone on the Internet," Samuels told Manhattan Supreme Court.
The prosecution argued that Samuels was stopped only after over 20 years of building his collection of child porn, the Post said, and only after "stunned computer techies" at New York Law stumbled over the pictures during routine computer maintenance. The prosecution had sought the maximum time under Samuels's plea agreement, 1/13-4 years behind bars.
