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$75,000 bail for Utah professor charged with looking at child porn on flight to Boston
By adamg on Mon, 11/28/2011 - 3:45pm
A fellow passenger alerted a Delta flight crew to the "explicitly sexual and extremely disturbing" photos of children Grant Smith was allegedly looking at on a plane headed to Boston, the Suffolk County District Attorney's office reports.
Smith, a material-sciences professor at the University of Utah, was ordered held in lieu of $75,000 bail following his arraignment today in East Boston District Court.
State Troopers took Smith into custody when his flight landed yesterday around 4:30 p.m. - and seized his university-purchased MacBook Pro:
Troopers recovered from that computer multiple still images depicting young girls, some naked and some engaged in explicit sexual activity with adult males. Based on captions embedded in the images and troopers' estimates, the children depicted were between the ages of 5 and 14 years old.
Smith was possibly coming to Boston for the Materials Research Society's fall conference at the Hynes, which started today.
Innocent, etc.
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Comments
Did he want to get caught?
I have a hard time believing that anybody would think they could rifle through such images in a public place like an airplane and nobody would say anything.
Oy, that mustache ... so stereotypical!
oy indeed
And did you read the academic bio:
...
and don't forget
Chemical engineeringly speaking, the man's a pig.
And then there's that mustache.
Should have worked for the SEC.
He could have looked at child pornography all day, instead of watching out for Madoff-type scams, and somehow, inexplicably, avoided exposure and prosecution.
There's more
He seems to be a bit deficient in his modeling of boundary conditions.
In fairness...
...the Globe today (print edition) had a photo of the individual and the creepy-crawly in his upper lip and the haircut look a little less ... uhm... warbly VHS porn?
Well, I used to work next to
Well, I used to work next to a guy that, whenever I would look in his direction, was clearly clicking away some website. One or 2 times I thought I saw something sexual, but before I could think the site would be clicked away. This guy appeared to be very normal, friendly and hard-working. So I kept wondering about that. Did I see that right? Or was I myself crazy? As his computer was a shared one, we once checked the browser history, and yes, there it was, many many sites with explicit gay-porn.
We never confronted him, but I also never dared looking up anymore when he was browsing next to me.
Nevermind the stache
What's up with that shirt? It's making my monitor hum.
I recall a recent story of a
I recall a recent story of a alleged graffiti artist getting an $80,000 bail. $5000 more than this (alleged) pedophile. Good thing we have our priorities in order as a society.
Bail is not about punishment
I don't know the specifics of either case, but bail amounts are not intended to align with severity of crime, so much as flight risk. It's quite possible that the $80,000 meant less to the graffiti artist than the $75,000 means to Professor
PedophileInnocent, etc.No reduction in bail
Smith asked a judge to reduce his bail, but a Suffolk Superior Court judge agreed with prosecutors to keep it at $75,000, which so far has kept him behind bars.
Suffolk County prosecutors argued for high bail by saying Smith will likely face additional charges and that he posed a significant flight risk, what with recent trips to Korea and Malaysia: