County DA Pushing Sexual Abuse of Minor Charges on HS Girls for Exhcanging Slumber Party Pictures with Each Other on Cell Phones

Students caught exchanging slumber party pictures of themselves in bras and panties,  threatened with criminal charges and possibility of lifetime sex offender status for sexually abusing themselves, unless they take 10 hour course on child pornography and sexual violence.

NY Times reports

When a high school cheerleader in northeastern Pennsylvania learned that she might face criminal charges after investigators reported finding a nude photo of her on someone else's cellphone, she was more confused than frightened at being caught up in a case of "sexting": the increasingly popular phenomenon of nude or seminude photos sent over wireless phones.

"They said they had a full-bodied naked picture of me, but I knew I'd never had any naked picture taken of me," the student, Marissa Miller, 15, recalled of the Feb. 10 telephone call to her mother as the two were having lunch together at Tunkhannock Area High School. Marissa is a freshman at the school, where her mother, MaryJo, works with special education students.

The picture that investigators from the office of District Attorney George P. Skumanick of Wyoming County had was taken two years earlier at a slumber party. It showed Marissa and a friend from the waist up. Both were wearing bras.

Mr. Skumanick said he considered the photo "provocative" enough to tell Marissa and the friend, Grace Kelly, that if they did not attend a 10-hour class dealing with pornography and sexual violence, he was considering filing a charge of sexual abuse of a minor against both girls. If convicted, they could serve time in prison and would probably have to register as sex offenders.

It was the same deal that 17 other students -- 13 girls and 4 boys -- accepted by the end of February. All of them either been caught with a cellphone containing pictures of nude or seminude students, or were identified in one or more such photos.

But three students, Marissa, Grace and a third girl who appeared in another photo, along with their mothers, felt the deal was unfair and illegal. On Wednesday, they filed a lawsuit in federal court in Scranton, Pa., against Mr. Skumanick.

They asked the court to stop the district attorney from filing charges against them, contending that his threat to do so was "retaliation" for the families asserting their First and Fourth Amendment rights to oppose his deal.

"Prosecutors should not be using a nuclear-weapon-type charge like child pornography against kids who have no criminal intent and are merely doing stupid things," said Witold J. Walczak, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, which represents the families.

Thanks to National Coalition on Censorship blog