Christopher Handley update
May 30th, 2009
Reactions continue to mount up to Christopher Handley’s guilty plea, although details about what actually happened remain scarce. Matt Thorn was asked to be an expert witness, and he reproduces his correspondence with the lawyers and some more recent e-mails from Handley’s mother at his blog. (It looks like his mother posted this comment as well.) From Ms. Handley’s e-mails (Thorn is convinced it’s really her), it seems that Handley pled guilty in hopes of getting little or no prison time, but the prosecutor is going for 71-90 months and Handley is now regretting the plea—but can’t withdraw it. It sounds like his job is in jeopardy as well.
I think a lot of the sympathy for Handley comes from the perception that he doesn’t seem to be a collector of child pornography per se, just a regular manga fan like you and me who happens to have a few over-the-top images in his collection. Susie of Studio QT sums this up nicely:
I think Handley’s real crime here is enjoying something from a different culture in a state that doesn’t really like anything outside of itself.
Indeed, one of the great unanswered questions about this case is why the postmaster was suspicious enough to open Handley’s mail in the first place. Tim Broderick wonders if there was something about the package that flagged it as containing obscene materials. That part puzzled me, too. Broderick argues that Handley is a “creepy guy” because of his reading material, which seems a bit unfair. The vast majority of Handley’s comics are not obscene; he is being prosecuted on the basis of a handful of images in a large collection. That’s what troubles many of us. Many perfectly ordinary-seeming manga contain images that go beyond the bounds of what’s acceptable in America, but if it’s an isolated image in an otherwise good story, you shrug and move on. Apparently that is no longer an option. Broderick acknowledges that being a creepy guy should not be a prosecutable offense, but I think most of us find Handley a more sympathetic defendant than Dwight Whorley, another defendant in a similar case, precisely because Whorley, who had a prevoius conviction for child pornography is creepy but Handley is not.
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Posted in Manga Blog