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April 29, 2005
Girl's slaying likely to spur debate on tougher porn laws
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. - The kidnapping, rape and slaying of a Sioux Falls girl has renewed debate over potential links between abuse and child pornography - and rallied an effort to toughen laws intended to protect children.
Murray James Jones, 41, is accused of taking 8-year-old Jessica Rae DeLaTorre from the home he shared with the girl's grandmother. Her body was found April 9 in a rural area near Fulton.
The evening before she was abducted, Jones viewed child pornography on an Internet cafe in Sioux Falls, which store workers said he had done before, police said.
Though Jones may have looked at child porn, he didn't download or take possession of it.
And it's that level of activity that's required for investigators to take action because just accessing it isn't a crime, said Minnehaha County Sheriff's Deputy Marv Thorstenson.
He and Sioux Falls Police Detective Andrea Kelly spoke Thursday on a panel about child porn and child abuse sponsored by the South Dakota Family Policy Council.
"They all take a lot of time," Thorstenson said of child porn investigations.
In the DeLaTorre case, "we weren't afforded the time that we would have liked to have," he said. "It gave us that much more initiative to investigate these crimes, rather than run away from them."
Thorstenson is part of the statewide Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force started by former Gov. Bill Janklow.
Thorstenson said he would like to see the law changed to make it possible to prosecute people caught with child porn images that their computer temporarily saves.
Having stored images does not now constitute a crime because there's no proof the person actually downloaded them, he said.
It would also help if the laws that apply to distribution and manufacturing child porn were separated from possession of it, Thorstenson said.
Rob Regier, director of the Family Policy Council, said three other possible law changes are likely be part of next year's legislative session. They would toughen sex crime penalties, increase funding for such investigations and improve the tracking of people on the sex offender list, possibly with tracking collars.
"The one good thing that comes out of Jessica's tragedy is now we're looking at improvements we can make to the law," he said.
Kelly said some people are getting desensitized because of the proliferation of porn.
"Each and every child that's represented in these images has been exploited and abused," she said. "Those images are being circulated forever."
She said parents need to supervise their children's Internet use to guard against images, e-mail or chat rooms that could hurt them.
"If you leave that Internet unprotected, you're letting the worst of the worst into your home," Kelly said.
"A kid with a computer in his or her bedroom is a big no-no," added Thorstenson.
Kelly said not everyone who views child porn abuses children, but she believes it can be a natural progression.
"If they view it over and over and over again, at some point they cross the line and then they act," she said.
The Rev. Kim Liedtke of Emmanuel Baptist Church in Sioux Falls, said sexual abuse of children should be everyone's concern.
"I do believe pastors and people in the Christian community must speak up on these issues," he said.
"This is a real problem and these kids are being harmed," Kelly said. "We definitely didn't want to see what we saw a couple of weeks ago."
Posted by Nealus at April 29, 2005 04:05 PM
