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TagsBY ALICIA CRUZ
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
An International Law Firm attorney was arrested at his Saddle River home Thursday on charges of distributing child pornography over a peer-to-peer file-sharing network on the Internet since September 2010.
FBI agent Joshua Wilson said Edward De Sear, 64, was taken into custody after agents executing a search warrant were given a laptop computer that De Sear admitted he used to download and share pornographic images of children. De Sear also allegedly told the agents that he was the only person in his home who used the file-sharing network, and that he received sexual gratification when observing the images.
According to the complaint, De Sear, a partner at the Allen & Overy Law Firm in New York, was in possession of two images that depicted grown men engaging in sexual acts with naked prepubescent boys, and a video of a rope-bound young girl being forced to perform a sex act on a man. Investigators say shared directories on De Sear's computer included pictures of other prepubescent children being restrained and sexually abused. The attorney is accused of sending the images on at least three occasions beginning last year.
Agent Wilson said because De Sear designated the pornographic files as shared files, he made them available for downloading by his community of friends on the P2P network, and thereby distributed the illegal images, NorthJersey.com reported.
After De Sear's arrest, an Allen & Overy spokesman released a statement to Legal Week saying the attorney had resigned from the firm, and added, "Everyone has been shocked and appalled by the news that a lawyer in our New York office, Edward De Sear, has been criminally charged by federal prosecutors in Newark, New Jersey, after being arrested at his home. This is now subject to a federal investigation so we cannot make any further comment," the ABA Journal reported.
The defendant appeared before U.S. Magistrate Judge Madeline Cox Arleo in Newark federal court, where he was placed under a $250,000 bond. He later posted bail and was released with an electronic monitoring device. If De Sear is convicted of the charge, he faces a mandatory minimum penalty of five years in prison, and a maximum potential penalty of 20 years in prison, in addition to $250,000 fine.
Is obtaining sexual gratification from the viewing and collecting photographs of Nazi Holocaust atrocities (a crime that contains within it all other crimes) similarly illegal and prosecutable?
Assuming arguendo this lawyer enjoyed viewing child pornography, I cannot connect how file sharing such images can lead to incarceration equivalent to that of aggravated assault of a public servant, murder, arson (of a habitation or place of worship), possession of more than 200 grams of certain drugs, aggravated robbery and aggravated kidnapping. A five year minimum sentence is an outrage. The lawyer did not produce a single photograph or movie of anybody's kid.
These images are produced in countries where it is acceptable to abuse children. Women in certain countries are stoned to death so maltreatment of women is acceptable in those spheres. Hence, to punish this one attorney for the misdeeds of foreign producers of pornography does nothing to stop such pronography and only destroys this one person and his surrounding family.
This lawyer will assuredly be convicted because of the federal policy articulated over the years on the subject of child abuse. He will lose his license and his home. His clients will lose a capable attorney who is serving their economic needs around the world.
Are we striking at the wrong enemy? Is there a way to capture the people who photograph these children and distribute them over the internet?