Supremes refuse to hear child porn appeal

AN ARIZONA TEACHER faces 200 years in jail after being caught with child porn images on his computer. Morton Berger claims the sentence - ten years for each of twenty images, to run consecutively - is disproportionate to his crime and is therefore unconstitutional.

Now the US Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal by Morton even though had he not lived in Arizona or had been tried by a federal court, the sentence would have been much lighter.

Morton can consider himself lucky - the state prosecutor demanded a 340 year sentence, but he now faces just 200 years with no possibility of a pardon or probation. His lawyers asked for an appeal as his sentence is longer than it would have been for rape or murder and therefore amounts to 'cruel and unusual punishment'.

According to the Child Welfare League of America, despite having the toughest child porn penalties in the US, Arizona ranks fifth nationally in the rate of children with substantiated reports of abuse and neglect, almost twice the national average.

And the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine report that young children are more likely to die of child abuse or neglect in Phoenix than any other major metropolitan area in the US. µ