Post by okay sing to me on Nov 18, 2017 13:45:37 GMT -5
Public defenders at all levels of the judicial system are in the business of settling cases, not seeking any kind of justice for their clients.
lorne_a_20014 (09/26/07 11:27:07 PM): can i take one of my penis in your vagina?
How would you fight against that line? I think Lorne's public defender may very well have listened to his protestations about the camera being to sell, his eye fell on this line from the chatlog, and he just went "yeahhhhh NO". It's just a non-starter. We have evidence in black&white stating he did intend to produce child pornography, and only his word - his after the fact word - that he intended to sell the camera. The word of Lorne Armstrong, so give that what value you think it deserves. I suspect he was flat-out lying about the visits to pawnshops. He said he wasn't sure he even had enough fuel to get to the sting house and back; how many detours could he afford to make? Even if he was telling the truth, the possibility of the pawnshops having video of him months later is so close to impossible that it may as well be. Who keeps video of completely uneventful days for that long? Security camera footage tends to be recycled eventually, to save media/space. This was 2007, well before the age of infinite data storage. They probably were still using physical tapes of some sort for their security cameras, assuming all of these supposed-pawnshops recorded the footage at all.
It's possible that if Lorne had had money to afford a high priced attorney, they could have looked into this further, but I think if anything it would have made things worse. Keep in mind, this attorney would be thinking "they're currently not charging my client with this, just hanging it over his head as a threat. If we fight on this point, it ceases to be a threat and becomes reality. There's a high chance we lose, and instead of 5 years, my client gets 15+". There's a risk vs. reward element here that I'm not sure even the most expensive lawyer in America would be willing to gamble on.
All speculation on my part, admittedly.
This is spot on, completely agree. Lorne claims he was desperately trying to sell that camera and wasn't going to take nudes pics with it yet after that question in the chat about taking pictures Lorne tries in his best half assed understanding of computers to teach the decoy how to hide the explicit pics they were going to take on her computer hard drive (Lorne wanted her to hide the CP in her gmail account hahaha). Lorne even asked the decoy for nudes, so at the very least he was getting a charge for soliciting CP, Kentucky doesn't mess around with these charges, Lorne was going down for CP in some sort of fashion. It was probably a weak indictment but I doubt given how damning the chatlog was Lorne would have beaten that particular charge.