United States Ninth Circuit

The district court's denial of petitioner's habeas corpus petition challenging his misdemeanor convictions for multiple counts of possessing and duplicating child pornography is affirmed, where: 1) the state court was not unreasonable to determine that the images were not protected speech; 2) there is no clearly established Supreme Court law holding that images of real children morphed to look like child pornography constitute protected speech; and 3) although the prosecutor erred by arguing that the jury’s determination could turn on the fact that otherwise innocuous images were displayed in a pornographic context, the error was harmless because the images in question were child pornography. (Amended opinion)

Appellate Information

• Decided 09/13/2013
• Published 09/13/2013

Judges

• PREGERSON

Court

• United States Ninth Circuit

Counsel