Convicted child pornographer loses bid for new trial
By The Associated Press
08.19.02
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CONCORD, N.H. — Former prep school teacher David Cobb won't get a new trial on charges that he was carrying a knapsack full of child pornography when he was arrested in Farmington seven years ago.
The former English professor from Phillips Andover Academy is serving eight to 15 years in prison for attempted sexual assault and hundreds of child pornography charges. Cobb was also convicted in Maine in 1996 of two counts of unlawful sexual contact in a 1985 incident involving a girl, 9, and a boy, 12, from Lebanon.
At the time of his New Hampshire arrest, he was walking with a young boy and carrying a backpack containing children's underwear, a pumpkin mask, a list of payments for "helping pumpkin" perform various sexual acts and hundreds of pornographic images.
Last month, Cobb asked Strafford County Superior Court Judge Bruce Mohl to overturn the convictions based on a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling, but the judge rejected the appeal Aug. 15.
Cobb's lawyer, Paul Haley, argued that Cobb's pictures — most made by pasting children's faces from clothing catalogues onto images of naked bodies from adult magazines such as Playboy — were not child pornography but artistic images protected as free speech under the First Amendment.
He cited an April ruling in which the U.S. Supreme Court said federal child pornography laws went too far in trying to ban computer simulations and other fool-the-eye depictions of teenagers or children having sex.
But Mohl pointed out that although the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition that "virtual pornography" was protected as free speech, it let stand another section of the federal law that bans pornographic images created by computer alteration of innocent pictures of children, such as the grafting of a child's school picture onto a naked body.
Mohl said most of Cobb's pictures were "morphed" images that remain illegal.
"While the children in the morphed photographs may belong to a different class of victims than children made to actually engage in sexual behavior in the production of child pornography, the children in the morphed photographs are nonetheless actual identifiable human victims, rather than computer-generated virtual images," he said.
Haley, who couldn't be reached for comment, also had argued that Cobb's former lawyer, Cathy Green, was negligent in not raising the First Amendment issue at trial or arguing that the photos were artwork.
But Green said both strategies were rejected because Cobb himself acknowledged some photos showed actual naked children, not just cut-and-paste creations. Challenging the charges based on the First Amendment or calling in an art expert only would have only drawn attention to that fact, she said.
Mohl agreed that Green made reasonable decisions not to pursue those strategies and noted that Cobb had been informed of her plans and approved of them at the time. He also rejected Cobb's claim that the trial prosecutor made a farce of the trial by wearing a baseball cap with the name "COBB" on it to a pretrial hearing and making fun of Cobb's career by pronouncing "Andover" in a snobby tone.
Former County Attorney Lincoln Soldati testified that he wore the hat as a joke in the courtroom lobby, and Mohl said there was no evidence the jury ever knew about it.
Cobb will be eligible for parole in December 2003.
Previous
Attorney: Convicted child pornographer's photos were protected speech
Lawyer argues David Cobb should have new trial in light of Supreme Court's recent decision overturning ban on virtual child porn.
07.09.02
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