Christopher John Czarnik, 45, is the focus of a novel criminal charge. The prisoner at Oaks Correctional in Michigan is serving time on a 2014 plea for the possession and distribution of sexually explicit images of children. He was then charged again with child porn in prison. The source? Czarnik himself. Guards found a drawing of a young girl engaged in sexual acts with an adult male. The drawings were upheld by the Michigan Supreme Court.
The correctional officer in 2016 also found a hand-written story of a 6-year having sex with adults. Czarnik then showed the officers more pictures and writings of this own creation.
That was deemed possession and creation of child porn. However, the images were of his own making and he insisted were purely fictional characters.
Czarnik entered a guilty plea with the condition that the legal issue be allowed to be litigated over what he claimed were ” cartoon characters.” That plea limited the added sentence to seven years.
Thus, the statute is divided such that subpart (i) covers depictions that were created using any part of an actual person and subpart (ii) covers depictions that were not created using any part of an actual person. Under subpart (ii), a depiction is criminalized, irrespective of whether it portrays an actual, real-life person, so long as it meets the definitions in MCL 750.145c(1)(b); that is, the depiction “[a]ppears to include a child” meaning that it appears to include, or conveys the impression that it includes, a person who is less than 18 years of age. Thus, defendant’s argument that his conduct did not violate the statute because his drawings were of a fictional child “Becky” instead of a real child necessarily fails because the drawings unmistakably conveyed the impression that a person less than 18 years of age was engaging in sexual activity. We also note that, while the drawings were hand-drawn, there is no mistaking that the drawings represented a human child—they were not outlandish “cartoons” that did not reasonably resemble a person. As such, the drawings were more than sufficient to meet the definitions of subsection (ii).