Santa Cruz Surf School owner Dylan Greiner was arrested last month, after half a million videos and photos of underage girls were found in his possession.
Within the past two weeks, two separate cases of men downloading child pornography were uncovered in Santa Cruz.
On August 14, Walter Louis Gafvert III, 48, of Boulder Creek was arrested for possessing child pornography, even reportedly downloading images of minors onto his phone while being questioned at the police station.
Two days later, Dylan Greiner, 38, owner of Santa Cruz Surf School, was arrested for a number of offenses, ranging from alleged lewd acts with minors to possession of some 500,000 videos and photographs of underage girls.
Both men were able to download many of the images, which may eventually make them part of the debate over banning certain criminals from the Internet. These bans are increasingly popular in such cases, when perpetrators have been granted probation or are out on parole, but they’re by no means a slam dunk for prosecutors.
Santa Cruz Assistant District Attorney Johanna Schoenfield has some unique experience with the Internet ban issue, having been the prosecuting lawyer in the case of Morgan Triplett, the UC Santa Barbara student who claimed she was raped while visiting the UC Santa Cruz campus in April. The police investigation that followed found that the alleged rape was a hoax; Triplett had posted an ad on Craigslist to find someone to beat her up in exchange for consensual sex.
Schoenfield requested that Triplett be banned from using the Internet entirely, due to her use of Craigslist to instigate the crime. But the court ruled against a full ban, instead forbidding Triplett from using the Internet for “criminal conduct,” a seemingly pointless measure which raises the question: Isn’t all criminal conduct on the Internet already illegal?
Because her false claim greatly alarmed the community and lead to a costly police search for a rapist who didn’t exist, Triplett should have been kept off the Internet altogether, says Schoenfield.
“I didn’t think that restriction had sufficient teeth,” says Schoenfield, who adds that the complexities of a partial ban make it even harder to enforce.
The Internet has opened a whole new world where cyber bullies, scammers and pedophiles find countless ways to hide, which has led to new ways to combat them.
Last November, Proposition 35 was passed to lengthen prison sentences for sex traffickers and register them as sex offenders. The proposition also required that California sex offenders would have to disclose all of their Internet activity.
While that might seem like an obvious measure to many, Northern California American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Staff Attorney Michael Risher says it’s far from it, at least the way Prop. 35 is written.
“This [proposition] can include people convicted of indecent exposure 30 years ago, 40 years ago, all of those people —75,000 living in California,” he says.
“Sex offender” is a broad umbrella term, Risher says, and those who fall under that category need to hand over all e-mail addresses, passwords, screen-names and Internet provider information—everything they do online.
“We went to court the day after the election with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), arguing that this violates the First Amendment rights of many of these registrants,” says Risher. “Although the government would be justified in monitoring the Internet use of some people that have been convicted of sex offenses, it was much too broad to serve any legitimate government interest.”
The ACLU and the EFF managed to receive a preliminary injunction to stop the law going into effect and will argue their case in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit next month.
Schoenfield says the use of Internet bans is a legitimate and important tool for dealing with certain types of criminal activity.
“People who commit crimes don’t have the same liberties as people who don’t,” she says. “Our primary interest is public safety.”
Risher accepts that there are certain situations where a person should be monitored, but believes banning someone entirely when they’re trying to reintegrate into society is a major mistake.
“You want people who are finishing their sentences in the community to get jobs, to communicate with their friends and family members, because if there’s one thing that’s entirely clear it’s that those factors reduce recidivism,” he says. He prefers the monitoring of convicted felons, with a full Internet ban used as a last resort if there are repeated violations.
“When somebody is convicted of mail fraud, we don’t say you can't ever go to the post office,” says Risher. “If someone’s convicted of making harassing phone calls, we don’t turn off their phone service. We as a society recognize that that’s counterproductive.”
