U.S. Senator Josh Hawley introduced the Protect Act of 2022, a bill that aims to toughen the existing penalties for possessing child pornography.
According to the New York Times, child sexual abuse material (CSAM) skyrocketed to 45 million in 2018. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children said there were nearly 85 million images and videos of CSAM on the internet. An article published in 2019 said pornography was declared a "public state crisis" in 16 states. Children who viewed porn also grew in number said the Boston Globe.
"The horror of child pornography is exponentially worse than it was a decade ago, and judges handing out lenient sentences for these criminals is a big reason why," said Senator Hawley in a press release.
"While the White House continues to dismiss concerns about leniency toward child porn offenders as a 'desperate conspiracy theory,' the numbers speak for themselves. Congress must act before this problem becomes even worse," he continued.
The bill was co-sponsored by Senators Mike Lee, Rick Scott, and Thom Tillis. It would "protect children from sexual exploitation by enhancing the penalties for possessing child pornography and by preventing judges from sentencing offenders below federal guidelines." Representative Ken Buck was introduced as companion legislation in the House of Representatives.
If signed into law, the Federal law would impose a five-year mandatory minimum sentence for receiving and owning child pornography to ensure that every child offender would be imprisoned. The bill would also prohibit judges from sentencing below the guidelines during the trial or if the crime was admitted by the defendant. It will ensure that judges would impose tougher sentences on child pornography offenders.
The bill was introduced after the heated questioning of Hawley to Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, Faithwire reported. Hawley asked Jackson if she regretted giving just a three-month sentence to an offender who sends and receives hundreds of pornographic images of children. The federal judge tried to answer based on the data and processes she follows for her judgments. Yet, the senator repeated himself asking if she regretted it. Jackson answered, "What I regret, is that in hearing about my qualifications to be a justice in a Supreme Court, we've spent a lot of time focusing on this small subset of my sentences."
The proponents of the bill argued that "Judges are required to sentence criminals within ranges set by the federal Sentencing Guidelines, subject to some exceptions." In 2003, Congress had passed the first Protect Act to restrict the concessions and enhance the consequences of child pornography cases.
"The Protect Act worked," said in the press release. "But the Supreme Court gutted it in 2005, in United States v. Booker, a controversial 5-4 decision. Since then, some federal judges like Ketanji Brown Jackson have used their discretion to impose lenient sentences on child porn offenders."
In an interview on MSNBC, Senator Dick Durbin suspected the GOP of pandering to QAnon conspiracy theorists though he agreed on amending the laws on child pornography. Hawley on the other hand shared a Twitter post saying that child pornography wasn't a conspiracy theory but an epidemic.
