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Updated Tuesday, February 9, 2010 1:09 pm TWN, By Amy Forliti, AP

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U.S. woman requests restitution in hundreds of child porn cases

Marsh, who declined to make Amy available for an interview, is seeking restitution for Amy in 350 cases nationwide. Each request is about $3.4 million. She won't get that amount in every case. But any sum collected would go toward that total to cover Amy's counseling, medical costs, future lost earnings and lawyer fees.

Courts have been divided on how to handle the requests. At least two courts in Florida ordered restitution of more than US$3.2 million, but some others ordered nominal amounts. Several others denied it.

“Everyone is really grappling with this in good faith,” Marsh said. “It's all over the place.”

In Minnesota last month, a federal judge ordered prosecutors to explain why they didn't ask for restitution in a case involving images of Amy.

The court “will no longer accept silence from the government,” wrote U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz.

In a response brief, Assistant U.S. Attorney Erika Mozangue wrote that prosecutors didn't get a restitution request until after a plea deal had been worked out, and added, “The determination of restitution in possession cases is an unsettled issue.”

Some defense attorneys have argued that children are not victimized by mere possession of pornography or that their client had no direct connection to the victims. Others have argued it's impossible to fairly calculate how much harm one offender caused the victim.

After a federal judge in Florida found Arthur Weston Staples III, of Manassas, Virginia, jointly liable for US$3.5 million in restitution for having an image of Amy, Staples' attorney, Jonathan Shapiro, argued on appeal that there was no connection between the two “other than the fact that he possessed her image on his computer approximately 10 years after that image had been manufactured by her uncle ... who caused her extreme damage.”

Prosecutors should have to prove that Amy was a victim of Staples' particular act, and that she would not have been harmed if Staples hadn't had the image, Shapiro argued. The appeal is pending.

A federal appeals court recently upheld a Texas judge's decision to deny restitution because prosecutors didn't show how much harm the specific defendant caused. The ruling in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals drew a sharp dissent from Judge James Dennis.

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