First American conviction for lolicon

Dwight Edwin Whorley (born 1952) is the first person to be charged under the PROTECT Act of 2003 for ownership of lolicon pornography.

In 1996, the United States Congress passed an act entitled the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996, which expanded the definition of child pornography to include virtual images. In 2002, the Supreme Court found that this law was unconstitutional due to its infringements on the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

In 2003, Congress passed a law including a slightly revised form of the virtual child pornography prohibition. This law has not yet been subject to judicial review. The definition in this law is:

"[C]hild pornography" means any visual depiction, including any photograph, film, video, picture, or computer-generated image or picture, whether made or produced by electronic, mechanical, or other means, of sexually explicit conduct, where…such visual depiction is a digital image, computer image, or computer-generated image that is, or is indistinguishable from, that of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct[.]

Whorley was caught downloading the images from a computer at the Virginia Employment Commission while on parole for previous sex offense convictions.

Whorley was convicted for receiving both "twenty obscene Japanese anime cartoons that graphically depicted prepubesecent female children being forced to engage in genital-genital and oral-genital intercourse with adult males" and "fourteen digital photographs of actual children engaging in sexually explicit conduct" and for "sending and receiving twenty obscene E-mails which graphically described, among other things, parents having sex with their own children."

A jury convicted him on 74 counts of child pornography charges. He was sentenced on March 10, 2006 to 20 years in prison.

Inmate Whorley (ID # 35337-083) is currently incarcerated in The Federal Correctional Institution Gilmer in Glenville, West Virginia. His projected release date is in September 3 2022.

An appeal was made and rejected on December 19, 2008, where a judge voted to uphold the PROTECT Act of 2003, and that the people depicted in images did not need to exist for it to be a crime, similar to the ruling in Canada from 1993.

See also

• Lolicon

External links

• Whorley's profile on Virginia Sex Offender Registry
• Cornell Law School summary of 2002 Supreme Court declaration of unconstitutionality of the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996