Prosecutors’ Request to Release Naughton Denied

A federal judge on Monday rejected prosecutors’ request to release from custody former Internet executive Patrick J. Naughton, who was convicted last week of possessing child pornography.

Prosecutors had made the unusual request as part of an agreement with Naughton’s defense attorneys filed Friday after an appeals court struck down a provision of the federal law on child pornography. That ruling blocks the government from outlawing “virtual” or computer-generated sexual images that only appear to be pictures of real children.

Naughton, who was convicted last week in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, faces up to 10 years in prison on the child pornography charge. He is scheduled to be sentenced March 6. Jurors in the case failed to reach a verdict on two other counts accusing Naughton of using the Internet to solicit a minor.

Prosecutors had agreed with Naughton’s defense attorneys that the former executive vice president of Walt Disney Co.’s Go.com Web site should be released on bond Monday while the lawyers studied the appeals court ruling. But U.S. District Judge Edward Rafeedie refused, citing his own interpretation of the appeals court decision.

Rafeedie said Naughton could be freed from custody to await sentencing if there is “substantial likelihood” that the appeals court ruling would result in an acquittal or a new trial. But the judge said there was “no relation” between last week’s ruling on the pornography law by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and the case involving Naughton, a Silicon Valley star who was fired from his job in September after he was arrested.

FBI agents took Naughton into custody at the Santa Monica Pier after he showed up for what authorities said he expected to be a sexual tryst with a 13-year-old girl. Authorities found sexual images of children on his laptop computer.

The arrest followed a months-long sting operation in which an agent posing as a teen corresponded with the Seattle-based executive in an online chat room.

Rafeedie noted that “a government witness testified that two of the children depicted in images seized from [Naughton’s] laptop computer have been specifically identified as actual minors living in Great Britain,” and that Naughton’s lawyers never suggested other pictures were of anything other than real children.

Last week’s appeals court decision, the judge said, “does not legalize the possession of actual child pornography, which is precisely what the defendant was shown to have possessed in this case.”

Naughton’s attorneys filed papers Monday requesting he be freed while awaiting sentencing. They contend that the instructions given to the jury were flawed because they included legal language from a section of the child pornography law that was struck down the next day by the appeals court. A hearing on the defense motion is set for Wednesday.