Thomas Reedy used to be a nurse. Then he found the Net and made a fortune. Now he faces 1,335 years in jailThe world's biggest convicted child pornographer
Last week Pete Townshend lost his reputation and gained five years on the sex offenders register after accessing a child porn website.<massive snip>
The jury in Reedy's trial was evidently appalled, taking just a few hours to convict. The only person who seems to have been surprised was Thomas Reedy, who to this day professes his innocence and says that he has been the victim of an appalling injustice.Reedy apparently did see himself as only a businessman and a distributor. The police investigation was unable to prove that he was a pedophile, or that he was making or directly selling child porn himself. However, he failed completely to understand that ethics should enter into his decisions on what to sell. I can see that his defense might have worked if the websites had been selling legal porn as well as illegal child porn, and he could say the webmasters misrepresented to him what they were selling. After all, this is what the ISPs and credit card companies say, right? That they can't be expected to check through the business of their clients to see what they're selling?