Virginia’s ACLU President Gets 7 Years for Child Porn

J. Michael Sharman

Charles Rust-Tierney pleaded guilty to obtaining hundreds of pornographic images of children as young as four years-old, including a six-minute video of sexual torture of children set to music by the rock band Nine Inch Nails. He viewed the pornography on the computer in his 11-year-old son's bedroom.[4]

Rust-Tierney was accessing child pornography online at least as early as June 2004. About 560 images and 137 videos of child pornography were seized from his home.[5]

The web site for Virginia’s ACLU chapter still listed Charles Rust-Tierney as a board member at the time of his arrest.[6] Ironically, back in 1998, Charles Rust-Tierney, as the President of the ACLU of Virginia, was at the forefront of the battle urging the Loudon County Library Board not to put any pornography filters on the library’s internet portals.[7] The ACLU and others sued the Library’s Board of Trustees for filtering out pornography, and the Court agreed and ordered the County to pay the ACLU’s attorney fees in the amount of $37,037.25.[8]

The ACLU in Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union, 542 U.S. 656 (2004) challenged the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), a statute enacted by Congress to protect minors from exposure to sexually explicit materials on the Internet. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed with the ACLU that the Government had not met its constitutional burden of showing that: “COPA is the least restrictive alternative available to accomplish Congress' goal.”

Those ACLU victories probably seemed ridiculous to Rust-Tierney as he listened to the words of the judge who sentenced him, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III: “The child pornography you purchased was of the most abhorrent kind,” Judge Ellis said. “[T]he term 'child pornography' does not convey the depravity [of the images]. …I don't think five years is enough.”[9]

The computer images on Rust-Tierney’s computer showed the rapes of young children and children who were hung from their wrists while they were sexually tortured.[10]

“You bought this child pornography [because] you liked to watch it,” Judge Ellis told Rust-Tierney. “It is an appetite you need to address….I tell all defendants that life is composed of making choices and living with those consequences. You made a very bad choice over a very long time.” [11]

Judge Ellis asked Rust-Tierney, “What's the most important thing to you in your life, Mr. Tierney?” Rust-Tierney answered, “My children.”[12] Rust-Tierney told Judge Ellis that one of the “harshest parts” of this ordeal was that, “All of this pain and ugliness is part of the future I will give my two sons.”[13]

Judge Ellis told him, “You can't consume child pornography and be a good parent.” Standing before the judge, Rust-Tierney immediately said, “Of course not, your honor.”[14]

It is typical in a sentencing hearing for the court to receive letters supporting or opposing the defendant and for the defendant to also give one to the court, but Jonathan Shapiro, Rust-Tierney’s lawyer, said that, “The court may well have never seen a letter like Mr. Tierney’s before. …You can almost hear him screaming in that letter.” Rust Tierney’s letter calls his crime, “an abomination” and says, “I did this. I must be punished.”[15]

“What I did was wrong, morally and legally,” Rust-Tierney told the judge. “For each of those materials, there was a real victim.”[16]

The prosecutor, Edward McAndrew, agreed. “These are digital crime scenes,” he said. “The agents investigating these crimes have never seen images worse than the images here.” McAndrew gave the court dozens of letters from parents and children who appeared in child pornography describing what they went through. The judge said the letters were “heart-rending.” [17]

Prosecutor McAndrew concisely stated the case against the entire pornography industry when he warned the court, “As long as there are consumers like Mr. Tierney, there will be more [victims].”[18]

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By J. Michael Sharman Click here for bio and archived articles