Ex-Professor at Yale Wins Resentencing in Pornography
Originally published by The New York Times, May 13, 2003
A federal appellate court has upheld the conviction but ordered a review of the sentencing of a former Yale University professor convicted of downloading tens of thousands of images of child pornography.
On May 2, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York ordered that Federal District Court in Hartford resentence the professor, Antonio Lasaga, an award-winning geochemist and a former house master in Saybrook College, one of Yale's residential colleges.
Mr. Lasaga pleaded guilty in 2000 to receiving 150,000 pornographic images of children on his home and university computers and to possessing two videotapes depicting his own sexual activities with a child. He was sentenced by Judge Alvin W. Thompson in February 2002 to 15 years in prison.
Mr. Lasaga also pleaded no contest that month in state court to charges of raping a boy he mentored when the child was 11 and 12 and filming the assault.
He was sentenced to 20 years, to be served concurrently with the federal sentence. His lawyer, Diane Polan of New Haven, is appealing the state conviction.
In dismissing the federal sentence, the circuit court found that the sentence was too long.
At the appellate hearing on Jan. 10, Ms. Polan had argued that her client's sentence was longer than the 9 to 11 years recommended under federal guidelines.
Reached yesterday by telephone, Ms. Polan said she would not speculate on what the new sentence would be.
In her appeal, Ms. Polan had argued that the images received by Mr. Lasaga were not illegal since most of them were not of actual children but were computer-generated images and therefore protected by the First Amendment.
The government argued that such a distinction did not figure in the charge or in Mr. Lasaga's plea, said John A. Danaher III, a deputy United States attorney.
The new sentencing hearing has not been scheduled. Mr. Danaher said yesterday that his office would decide its next step this week, including whether to ask for another hearing before the federal appellate court. "He could still be sentenced at the top of the range to 14 instead of 15 years," Mr. Danaher said, referring to Mr. Lasaga, an inmate at a federal prison in Cumberland, Md.
According to evidence presented at his federal sentencing, Mr. Lasaga was investigated but not charged in three out-of-state episodes of pedophilia beginning in 1981.
