Well, Norma, one thing is clear: you are indeed comfortable with rhetorical devices. As for recognizing and tackling important issues which don't mesh with your pre-conceived values, maybe not so comfortable. You've smoothly avoided responding to both A) the author's point, and B) the point you yourself raised (and demanded others answer). To wit: A) that current legislation leaves a number of child porn laws (and the protocol for the legal system's response) dangerously murky; B) that there are proposed solutions for remedying this. I won't take the time to once again lay these out for you, as this is done adequately in both my (and others') previous responses, as well as in the article itself.

Now let's all get a life. Over and out.

LOS ANGELES - A renowned geneticist was convicted Wednesday of molesting a colleague's daughter, starting at age 10 when the girl took martial arts classes at his home.

William French Anderson, 69, is widely credited as the "father of gene therapy," a promising but controversial experimental medical treatment that involves injecting healthy genes into sick patients. His successful treatment of a patient this way in 1990 launched the field.

Anderson was convicted of one count of continuous sexual abuse of a child under age 14 and three counts of committing a lewd act on a child.

He showed no reaction as the verdicts were read. He sat stoically, staring straight ahead, his head held high.

His wife, a renowned surgeon, sat in the front row of the spectator section behind him with her eyes downcast and fists clenched in her lap.

Despite pleas by Anderson's lawyer that he should stay free to continue his scientific work, Superior Court Judge Michael E. Pastor ordered him jailed.

"While Dr. Anderson is statutorily eligible for probation, he is clearly facing possible decades in prison," the judge said. Prosecutors said the scientist faces a maximum 22 years in prison.

In ordering Anderson's incarceration, the judge also cited an e-mail Anderson wrote to his victim suggesting he might commit suicide and saying he had bought a gun and ammunition.

Anderson's lawyer, Barry Tarlow, told the judge his client was not a danger to himself or anyone else and would not flee.

He also vowed to appeal the verdicts "to the highest court in the land. We will not rest until justice is done."

Anderson had been free on bond during the trial.

The judge ordered a psychiatric study of Anderson before his Nov. 17 sentencing.

Co-prosecutor James Garrison said the judge can consider a wide variety of factors, including Anderson's work, in sentencing the scientist.

"We all acknowledge the contributions he has made in the past. But what's important now is the damage he did to the victim," Garrison said.

Co-prosecutor Cathryn Brougham said she had conveyed the verdict to the victim, who is now 19, and "she is very pleased."

Jurors sent word to the judge that they did not want to speak to the media after the verdicts were read.

Prosecutors accused Anderson of molesting the girl from 1997 to 2001. They said the abuse began during Saturday morning taekwondo lessons at his home in San Marino, a wealthy suburb east of Los Angeles.

"There was the secret dirty side to that relationship," Brougham told jurors in her opening statement at the three-week trial.

Anderson has been placed on leave from his position as director of the Gene Therapies Laboratories at the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine.

Anderson has published hundreds of articles in scholarly journals and won numerous awards for his work. He was Time magazine's runner-up for Man of the Year in 1995 and launched the scientific journal Human Gene Therapy.

Tarlow had argued that his client was a kindly mentor to the girl and was being smeared by her mother, whom he said wanted to assume Anderson's position at USC.

Tarlow said that while Anderson was brilliant in the lab, he lacked social skills, as evidenced by e-mails introduced at trial in which he wrote about pondering suicide if the girl's allegations became public.

"Nothing about having a 176 IQ means you have good judgment," Tarlow said during the trial

You don't fucking know who the pedophiles, molesters, perverts are.

So STFU, you CIS-wannabes and let the system do their job.

You don't wanna be a part of that investigative system Rspect children and use common sense.

And get involved somewhere besides the letters section of a shitty website.

It seems to me that some of the intense arguing is the result of the fact that a bunch of different issues are getting thrown in a blender and combined.

First, do you sympathize with the father because he experienced something incredibly frightening? I certainly do. I'm sure it was horrifying, largely because of the anticipation of things that might happen that would be even more horrifying.

Second, do you think the father showed bad judgment in taking not only photos of the kids, but also photos of the kids and the adults naked together, allowing kids to take pictures without supervision in a setting where people were naked, and then taking the pictures to be developed at Eckerd's? I certainly do. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Third, does that mean that he actually did anything dirty or untoward by taking them? I don't. Bad judgment, yes. Indicative of a lack of respect for his children's privacy? Not to me.

Fourth, is it a good thing or a bad thing that a drugstore employee who receives pictures of adults and kids naked is asked to report it to someone? To me, that's a sad, but good, thing. If you found out that someone was having pornographic pictures developed at a drugstore and the employee who developed them said nothing, that would also be awful.

Fifth, could he have made this easier on his kids by trying to control his own responses a little bit and not, as someone else pointed out, making it a far more extensive witch hunt in his head than it was in actuality? Probably. And that's sad, because I'm sure he's a good dad, and I'm sure it arose out of fear and love for his kids, but I do think that his immediate resort to raging against the unfairness of it all before a whole lot had even happened probably made it more of an issue for his kids than it would have been if he had said, "You know, there was nothing wrong with anything that happened on the camping trip, but they just want to talk to you guys and make sure you're doing okay." It's hard to read his account and not conclude that *his* introduction of the possibility that the kids would be taken away was not a good move and didn't help the kids.

Sixth, what do you think of the policy decision to essentially go forward with the investigation until you're confident there's nothing to worry about, rather than the more typical criminal investigation, where you drop it unless you have strong evidence to go on? I think part of the trick to understanding why that happens is to remember the historical context. Laws like that developed because of the tendency of law enforcement throughout history to under-react to domestic situations; to not "interfere" with what parents were doing, often to the detriment of children.

Keep in mind; his kids were not removed. He was not charged. They investigated. They didn't call his friends, they didn't require his kids to do anything except talk to someone one time. I'm sure it was terrible; I'm very sympathetic. But the system has brakes, and here, they actually *were* applied before anyone charged him, took any action toward removing the kids, made anything public, and so forth. The suggestion that you have to set up your system so that it won't even *investigate* a situation unless that situation is fairly damning seems unrealistic to me. This is a very sad story. But I don't know that it's anything more than that, in that I don't know that it damns either the father or the system. Sometimes, there are sad stories even in a system that operates the way it should. I guarantee you that there would also be sad stories if the system were changed in the ways the author suggests. A pair of "legal eyes" would screw up; someone granted immunity for not reporting would choose not to report because he didn't want to get involved, and a kid would wind up getting hurt. Things happen; it's a bad situation. But I don't know that either the system or the father deserves the rap that both are getting.