The Child Protection eNewsletter

Vermont girl's uncle may face death penalty

A 12-year-old girl found dead last week in a shallow grave near her uncle's home in Vermont was killed, a federal prosecutor said at an initial appearance for the uncle on charges of kidnapping the girl. Fox News article here Michael Jacques, who is accused of abducting his niece, Brooke Bennett, was ordered held until his trial on a federal kidnapping charge.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Craig Nolan said Brooke's death was a homicide, but he didn't say how she was killed. No one has been charged with her death. State police say it could take eight weeks before autopsy results are available.

Jacques could face the death penalty if convicted under federal law of kidnapping resulting in Brooke's death.

Prosecutors say Jacques, 42, abducted Brooke on June 25. After a weeklong search, she was found buried about a mile from his home in Randolph, about 50 miles southeast of Burlington.

Jacques is a registered sex offender. He was convicted in 1993 of kidnapping and raping a woman he supervised at a fast food restaurant.

Citing statements from another underage girl, prosecutors claim in an affidavit that Jacques tricked Brooke into thinking she was going to a party and instead took her to his Randolph home to initiate her into a child sex ring on the day she disappeared.

At a hearing in the same court earlier Monday, Brooke's former stepfather, Raymond Gagnon, did not contest his continued detention on obstruction of justice charges related to the case. Gagnon, of San Antonio, is accused of having someone throw out his laptop computer a week ago while authorities were searching for Brooke.

Gagnon married Brooke's mother in 2000, but they later divorced. During Gagnon's hearing, federal prosecutors in Alabama charged the 40-year-old with possessing child pornography at his former home in Cullman, Alabama.

In affidavits filed in Vermont, the FBI said Jacques changed a posting to Brooke's MySpace account the night she was reported missing. Gagnon also accessed the account that night, but denied changing the posting, according to the affidavit.

In announcing the pornography charge, federal prosecutors in Birmingham, Alabama said Gagnon acknowledged trying to access the account again from a public computer in the Cullman library "on or about" June 26, the next day. The complaint in Alabama said Gagnon flew from San Antonio to Cullman that day and on to Burlington on June 27.

Google in deal with Brazil to fight child porn

Internet search company Google signed an agreement with Brazilian public prosecutors to help combat child pornography on its social networking site Orkut, an accord that the company believes is the first of its kind internationally. MSNBC article here

Under the agreement, Google will use filters to remove and prevent illegal content on Orkut, which has about half its users in Brazil. The company will also facilitate evidence gathering under judicial order in suspected crimes against children and teen-agers on Orkut without the need for international legal accords.

Google will also preserve for six months access logs of users being investigated for illegal conduct.

Google said it was the first such agreement that the company had signed and the firm believes it is the first internationally. Alexandre Hohagen, president of Google in Brazil, told a congressional committee, "It's an historic day not only for Brazil but for the Internet in the entire world."

Brazilian prosecutors say 90 percent of illegal Internet content being investigated in Brazil involves Orkut. The site has 60 million users, half of them in Brazil.

Meanwhile, a federal judge ruled that the online video-sharing Web site YouTube, owned by Google, has to turn over all its user logs to Viacom, the mega-corporation that owns MTV, Paramount Pictures, Comedy Central and VH1, among others. Fox News story here Click here to read the ruling (pdf)

Viacom sued Google last year, claiming that YouTube willfully infringed its copyrights by letting its users post clips from "South Park" and "The Daily Show" willy-nilly. YouTube, citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, argues it doesn't have to take down those clips until Viacom complains about each and every one.

Google must now turn over all its data about YouTube visitors on four 1-terabyte hard drives, a staggering amount of data, as well as copies of all clips it has ever taken down. (One terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes.)

Viacom wants the data to prove that copyrighted "stolen" material is more popular among YouTube visitors than original "user-generated" material.

In other news

Louisiana is considering joining more than a dozen other states that allow the confinement of sex offenders beyond their prison sentences, by involuntarily placing them in mental health facilities for treatment. ABC News story here The laws have proven popular, with supporters saying they help protect the public from violent sex offenders who may commit new crimes when they leave jail and give needed treatment to offenders who likely aren't getting it behind bars. In the most recently ended legislative session, lawmakers asked the state health department to study ways to set up a civil commitment system for Louisiana's violent sex offenders. A study panel will make recommendations to the Legislature within six months.

Sexual predators are using gaming consoles such as the Wii, PlayStation and Xbox to meet children online. USAToday story here "Child predators are migrating from traditional methods to alternate media," says Detective Lieutenant Thomas Kish of the Michigan State Police. "They are going to places where children are." Predators view games that allow kids to access the Internet and text message other players as a "foot in the door," he says. Parents may not realize that gaming consoles have become Internet devices or that savvy kids can bypass parental controls, says Marc Rogers, director of Purdue University's Cyber Forensics Lab. Police who have been doing stings in Internet chat rooms for years now are going undercover to catch predators playing interactive games, ranging from Grand Theft Auto to old-fashioned chess and checkers.

A British police force agreed to give the parents of Madeleine McCann 80 pieces of information about its investigation into her disappearance in Portugal last year. Fox News article here In return for Leicestershire police's agreement to release that information, parents Kate and Gerry McCann have agreed to drop a court case that sought the release of all information held by the force. "These are 80 potential new leads. We have information we can work on," said Clarence Mitchell, spokesman for the McCanns. The couple, who live in Rothley in Leicestershire, did not attend the court hearing in London but were on vacation with their two other children. Portuguese police said last week they had completed their final report into the girl's disappearance but had not decided whether to close their investigation. TIME Magazine story here Madeleine vanished from the family's apartment in the Portuguese resort of Praia da Luz on May 3, 2007, shortly before her fourth birthday. For more on this case, see vol5_iss34, vol5_iss53, vol6_iss3, and vol6_iss11.

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Denver has agreed to pay $5.5 million to settle 18 more claims by people who said they were sexually abused by priests when they were children. AP story here With the agreements announced last week, the archdiocese has settled 43 sex-abuse allegations since 2005 for a total of $8.2 million. Two suits remain unresolved. The archdiocese also agreed to a long-standing demand by some of the plaintiffs to release files on one former priest who was accused in 16 of the newly settled claims. "It is my hope that these settlements help the victims and their families to heal," Archbishop Charles Chaput said. Also, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis reached a financial settlement with six men who claimed they were sexually molested by five priests as far back as the 1960s, a victims' advocacy group said. AP article here The men will be paid $312,500, with settlements ranging from $90,000 to $20,000, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests said in a statement.

The group said the settlements were finalized in recent weeks through mediation. Bernard Huger, an attorney for the archdiocese, confirmed several abuse cases had been resolved through mediation. The victims' advocacy group said the priests sexually preyed on six boys between the ages of 8 and 15 at parishes and grade schools from the late '60s to the late 1980s.

A 43-year-old Springtown, Texas man was convicted of 43 child sex abuse counts last week. He was sentenced to 4,060 years in prison, to be served consecutively, and a fine of $430,000. KTXA article here The Parker County jury found James Kevin Pope guilty of sexually abusing three teenage girls in 2006 and 2007. He was convicted of 40 counts of sexual assault of a child and three counts of sexual performance by a child. The jury deliberated for three hours before returning the guilty verdict, and for another 90 minutes before returning the sentence.

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