The Pennsylvania ACLU has filed a lawsuit against District Attorney George Skumanick Jr., the prosecutor for Wyoming County, an area in north-central Pennsylvania not far from Scranton and Wilkes-Barre.
The rights organization is representing three teenage girls and their parents, who allege that Skumanick is abusing his authority and violating their First and Fourteenth Amendment rights by threatening the children with child-pornography charges. The issue is seminude and nude photos of the girls discovered on cell phones during an investigation at their school in the Tunkhannock School District.
School officials heard that photos of young women in various stages of undress were being shared via cell phone (a growing phenomenon among teens known as ‘sexting’) and seized a large number of phones from students. When the existence of the photographs was confirmed, the school turned the phones and images over to the district attorney’s office for further investigation.
Plea Deal Offered
Skumanick identified about 20 students involved in the production and distribution of the images and sent them letters offering to avoid criminal charges if they agreed to a six- to nine-month counseling program, a period of probation, and drug testing. All but the three girls named in the lawsuit accepted Skumanick’s offer.
The plaintiffs allege that the images in which they appear (two of the girls were in their underwear and one was topless with a towel wrapped around her) don’t legally constitute child pornography under either state or federal law, and that the images are protected by the First Amendment.
The parents also argue that compelling the girls to participate in a reeducation program to avoid baseless charges violates the parents’ Fourteenth Amendment rights to raise their children as they see fit.
Difficult Legal Issues
The ‘sexting’ phenomenon is raising difficult issues for parents, school officials, and law enforcement. Child-pornography statutes were traditionally intended to protect…