The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at Cincinnati ruled against Dean Boland, an Ohio attorney and expert witness who created digital child pornography in defense of his clients.  The court ordered a $300,000 civil judgment despite Boland’s attempt to file for bankruptcy.  The opinion was issued by Senior U.S. Circuit Judge David McKeague, appointed by George W. Bush.The appeals court opinions reads: “To help defendants resist child-pornography charges, technology expert and lawyer Dean Boland downloaded images of children from a stock photography website and digitally imposed the children’s faces onto the bodies of adults performing sex acts.  Boland’s aim was to show that the defendants may not have known they were viewing child pornography.  When the parents of the children involved found out about the images, they sued Boland under the civil-remedy provisions of two federal child-pornography statutes. The district court granted summary judgment to the parents and awarded them $300,000 in damages. We affirm.”

Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

Boland was an expert witness for both Oklahoma and Ohio defendants accused of possessing child pornography.  To make his point, he created “innocuous stock photographs of two children to show them engaging in sex acts,”  McKeague wrote, adding, “If Boland could whip up doctored pornography this easily, the argument went, then it’s possible the pornography his clients downloaded was doctored, too.  In essence, the defense was that there’s just no way of knowing whether real children are depicted in pornography found on the internet.”In Oklahoma federal court, prosecutors accused Boland of creating illegal child pornography, and yet, he continued to use the same exhibits in Ohio.  Ohio federal prosecutors “caught up with Boland,” according to the appeals court.  Boland’s testimony caught the attention of the FBI’s Cleveland office and his home and files were thoroughly searched.Prosecutors notified the children’s parents, the families filed a lawsuit, and each won a $150,000 judgment against the attorney.  Shortly after, Boland filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, but was unable to discharge the judgment due to “willful and malicious injury” to the families.The court argued, “Because Boland knew his morphed pornography depicted real minors yet kept using it in court, he willfully and maliciously injured the minors.  In knowingly morphing images of real minors into child pornography and displaying them in court, Boland must have been substantially certain that he would injure those minors – even if the morphing was for educational purposes…In this case, the evidence from the trial unquestionably established that Boland, of all individuals, fully understood that his intentional creation, possession and use of the morphed pornographic images of the children invaded the children’s interests in their privacy and reputation.”Boland’s position as a defense attorney, the court said, should have enabled him to understand the ramifications of his actions.  It stated, “As a lawyer and expert witness in the field of criminal defense in child pornography cases, Boland was aware that the use of identifiable real children in pornographic images was proscribed. … It similarly follows that based on his expertise Boland was aware of the harms inherent in violating child pornography laws.”

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Lawyer who created digital child porn as expert witness owes $300K to women whose photos he usedAppeals Court Decision6th Circuit: Lawyer Must Pay $300K for Using Stock Photos to Create Morphed Child Porn Trial Exhibit