Police blotter: Child porn in Web cache OK

From CNET News: Police blotter: Child porn in Web cache OK

What: Pennsylvania man appealed his conviction for knowingly possessing downloaded child pornography, saying he didn't know it was in his Web browser's cache.

When: The Pennsylvania Superior Court ruled on November 2.

Outcome: Court threw out conviction, saying state law criminalized only knowingly possessing child pornography, not simply viewing it.

What happened, according to court documents:
Anthony Diodoro was convicted of 30 counts of child pornography possession and one count of criminal use of a communication facility. He was sentenced to 9 months to 23 months in prison.

His conviction arose out of a slightly unusual situation: Prosecutors successfully proved that Diodoro had viewed child pornography sites and pointed to his Web browser's cache as evidence. (A browser cache is a temporary storage location for Web pages, so that if the same page is visited again, it can be quickly reloaded from the hard drive.)

But prosecutors did not prove that Diodoro actually knew the illegal images were saved to the cache, a common situation for novice users. …