He has been intensely interested in prostitutes for years, rating them, posting information about where to find them, their prices, etc. Now, he is doing the same thing regarding little girls. He rates them, publishes pictures of them, and talks about places to go find them and take pictures of them.
He has said that he is innocent, and has never touched a child, but, with words like this from his old website, it's likely that is false:
Quote:
There might have been a single mom or two with kids as well, but they all arrived in cars, so I didn't have the "need a ride?" offer to use, and the kids never separated from the parents (there weren't any playing in the park's playground on this cold day).
Corporate Sex OffendersCan Nothing Be Done About the Pedophile Blogger?: How the Law Deals With Dangerous PeopleSHERRY F. COLB
Status Versus ConductFor those who would like to confine child molesters in prison, however, the blogging pedophile poses a challenge. At least by his own account - an account that has yet to be contradicted with concrete evidence - McClellan has not molested any children, despite his evident urge to do so. To incarcerate a person because of his desires - when he has not acted on those desires - is to criminalize a status: the state of being a particular way. The U.S. Supreme Court said in
Robinson v. California, however, that criminalizing a status (in that case, the status of being a drug addict) violates the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Accordingly, under our Constitution, a man's mere feelings of sexual attraction for children cannot, without more, form the basis for confining him in a cell. But what can one do to respond to the risk that a pedophile will molest children in the future?
Numerous states have passed legislation to address this contingency. Such laws permit the confinement of child molesters as sexual predators even if they have not been convicted of any offense or, if they have been convicted, if they have already finished serving their sentences. Repeat child-sex-offender Leroy Hendricks challenged the constitutionality of such laws in the early 1990's, but he lost, and the U.S. Supreme Court, in
Kansas v. Hendricks, upheld the Sexually Violent Predator Act.
A majority of the Justices characterized confinement under the Kansas law as a valid form of "civil commitment," comparable to the institutionalization of mentally ill and dangerous people (including those found not guilty of a crime by reason of insanity).
Confining a person as "dangerous" simply by virtue of his
desire to do something criminal, however, might not appear very different from confining a person because of a status. What is a drug addict, after all, besides a person who feels a strong urge to use drugs? To say that a person is
dangerous, then, requires some proof that the person is likely to act on his urges.
McClellan's Blog. . . .
Like the unapologetic candidate for parole, however, McClellan seems to revel in his desire to have sexual contact with children. By calling himself a pedophile, he indicates that he is not ashamed to feel the way he does but instead wishes to broadcast his desires. He is, in a word, defiant about his inclination to commit what most people view as a violent act that violates the physical and emotional integrity of innocent children. He is, perhaps more importantly, helping other pedophiles who want sexual access to children by reporting where a reader can find large groups of them.
A Map for the Child MolesterOne important factor in judging McClellan is determining why he does what he does. Why does he provide information about where readers can find children? A relatively innocent explanation might be that he knows other pedophiles are always trolling for fantasy material, and he offers them locales for gathering such material. (I say "relatively" innocent, because I do not believe that staring at children to memorize their faces for later masturbation is an entirely harmless activity - for one thing, a child might notice a pedophile's stare, understand its meaning at some level, and experience a feeling of discomfort and self-consciousness that might color his or her understanding of sex in the future.)
If McClellan's goal were simply to ensure that people know where they can observe children in their native habitat, however, then listing locales would appear to be unnecessary. Without really trying, most of us regularly encounter children during the course of an average day. Indeed, for this very reason, pedophiles attempting to avoid re-offending after release report finding it difficult to stay away from places where children might appear.
It seems plausible - perhaps most plausible - then, to conclude that what McClellan is doing is providing a guidebook to people who hope to act out their pedophilic fantasies, a "Zagat's" for child-molesters. People who hope to victimize a child are more likely to succeed in their criminal endeavor if they target places containing large numbers of children (given the predictable chaos that often reigns over such places). If this is McClellan's goal in blogging - encouraging and facilitating the sexual violation of children - then one can properly deploy the criminal law to stop him.
What Sort of Crime Has McClellan Committed?Traditionally, facilitating (or, in the criminal law lingo, "aiding and abetting") a criminal enterprise through speech is a legitimate target for law enforcement efforts.
. . . .
A rough analogy is the case of the Nuremberg Files, an anti-abortion web site that, among other things, posted the names of abortion providers. The site also included a line through the names of those providers who had been killed by anti-choice terrorists. As I discussed in a column that
addressed this case, such "speech" - though it does not expressly state "kill these people; they deserve to die; here is how you find them" - seems strongly to imply these sentiments. And the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit agreed, in the en banc decision in
Planned Parenthood v. A.C.L.A.
Another close analogy is to the web site "whosarat.com." This web site lists the names of informants and others cooperating with law enforcement, information gathered from documents that are technically public but to which few people have ready access. Some have attacked this site as inciting criminals to harm informants by giving them the information that they need to do so. The list also intimidates potential informants with the threat that their identities will be published on whosarat.com if they assist the police. Contributors to such a site, in my view, could be fairly characterized as having engaged in attempted witness tampering.
The Contrast Between Sites Defended as "Shaming" Sites and McClellan's SiteAs with other cases involving speech, the crucial question is how clear the blogger's intentions are. In the Nuremberg Files case, the court found unpersuasive the characterization of the website as simply acting within its First Amendment rights to provide information to "shame" people associated with abortion (and provide a record for future legal action), much as a website listing companies that hire sweatshop labor might do. In the "whosarat" case, one could similarly reject defenders' claims that the goal is simply to expose and "shame" the people engaged in exchanging dubious testimony for lenient treatment by the criminal justice system.
The pedophile's blog is different. He is not even ostensibly attempting to shame anyone. He does not hope to deter parents from bringing their children to the various places he lists. On the contrary, he likely wants the children to remain there, so that his readers will find his information accurate and helpful and "tune in" to future postings.
Why does the pedophile want to let people know where to find children? Is his goal to help people locate victims for molestation? Many suspect that it is. If one could prove as much in a court of law, then it might be possible to prosecute him for deliberately exposing children to sexual assault and molestation.
It is important to avoid censoring even the most offensive speech, even when it takes positions in conflict with existing law. But if a site like McClellan's is intended as a map for child molesters, then it could be said to step over the line from advocacy to criminal facilitation.
FindLaw --J.D.