Papercuts

Time must be flying by, Chris Langham is out of prison already - feels like he’s only been in there a couple of months.  Oh no wait, he has. Apparently downloading kiddy porn isn’t that bad afterall, certainly not worth ten months of someone’s life. Well, not someone whose on telly anyway. With these high profile celebrity court cases it’s always nice to think that judges are aware of the example they’re setting to others when deciding sentences for the various crimes commited by the rich and famous, but it’s hard to believe that’s true. Unless judges want to spread the word to paedophiles everywhere that if you get put away for downloading category 5 child porn images (the category reserved for the most base and explicit images) in the summer, don’t worry - we’ll get you out by Christmas. Of course the official main reason for Langham’s early release was the remote possibility that he was telling the truth and the images were downloaded for research. That stage of a writers research where they’ve just downloaded all the porn their going to write about, but haven’t quite got around to writing any notes, performing any other research or mentioning the project to anyone else yet. But the accusations being thrown at the descision by child welfare groups seem to have an ounce more credibility - Langham was released early because he’s famous. If this is true then Langham today walks free and joins the likes of Paris Hilton and Pete Doherty in the Hall of Fame-means-we-serve-far-less-time-than-we-should-for-the-crimes-we-commit. But he’ll have to clime his way into the A list before he can join Micheal Jackson and OJ Simpson and be too famous to be tried for his crimes at all. Meanwhile us lowly normals better carry on trying to stay out of prison the good old fashioned way - by not committing crimes.