Ex-Lawyer Asks U.S. Supreme Court to Overturn Conviction Stemming from Affair Photos
A once-successful lawyer is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to accept his cert petition and reverse a child porn conviction stemming from an affair he had with his wife’s16-year-old sister more than 35 years ago.
The U.S. Supreme Court may decide whether to accept the cert petition by Gary Peel as early as today, the Associated Press reports.
A series of mistakes led to legal trouble for Peel, a former lawyer in Madison County, Ill. It probably was not a good idea for Peel to take nude pictures of his 16-year-old sister-in-law, AP says, or to keep them for three decades.
“And it certainly was not advisable to try to use the pictures to blackmail his ex-wife, the woman’s sister, into redoing their divorce settlement,” the story continues. “Especially because his ex-wife had gone to federal authorities, who recorded the blackmail attempt on tape.”
Peel alleges the so-called child pornography case does not involve a child, since the age of consent in Illinois was 16 at the time of his affair in1974. Nor was there a federal child pornography statute in place; the law wasn’t enacted until 1978 and it didn’t ban pornographic photos of 16 and 17 olds until amended in 1984.
The U.S. Justice Department’s brief (PDF) counters that the child porn conviction was for possessing the photographs in 2006.
