All Jacqueline Mercado did was drop off four rolls of film at a drugstore's one-hour photo lab last October. And all she got for that hour's trouble was child porn charges that could have put her behind bars and put her children into foster care permanently. Hardly what a Peruvian immigrant freshly reunited with her boyfriend in time for their son's first birthday expected in America.
But that is exactly what the Dallas Observer reported. The Dallas County District Attorney has since dropped the child porn and other criminal charges against Jacqueline and her boyfriend, Johnny Fernandez, saying in late March that you can't get justice from isolating facts and making them fit a criminal statute.
But Dallas County Child Protective Services still has the two children in custody and is pushing to put them into foster care, taken away from Jacqueline and Johnny permanently. And it's all because a photo lab technician saw the images of her infant son breast feeding from her, plus both her sons romping naked in the bath with or without their mother, and other images of the family playing in bed, "show(ing)," the paper said, "less flesh than most freeway billboards."
The technician decided the images looked "suspicious," and the police he tipped off according to Texas law decided, the Observer said, that they were nothing short of sexual images. And the image of little Rodrigo Mercado suckling his mother's left breast is the one especially that could have put Jacqueline and her boyfriend, Johnny Fernandez, into prison, the paper said, because Fernandez took the picture - which Jacqueline posed for the sake of family memories, because Fernandez had never seen the baby breast-feeding and he'd been weaned off the breast before Fernandez's arrival.
The kicker: Even the attorney appointed by Dallas County CPS to represent the two young boys says the boys should be returned to their parents, according to the Observer.
This is not exactly the first such case in the United States. A few years earlier, an Ohio mother was forced to show in court that pictures she took of her own young children naked in the bathtub - a family photo album ritual since practically from the time the camera first became affordable for families - were not child porn, as another photo lab technician first reported under a similar state law.
