Utah justices ponder child-exploitation case

Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Sep 26, 2007 by Lucinda Dillon Kinkead Deseret Morning News

The conviction of a Utahn on several child-exploitation charges came to the attention of the Utah Supreme Court at a recent hearing when the defendant's attorney raised numerous questions about the case.

In April 2005, Lexis Alinas, now 47, was convicted of seven counts of exploitation of a minor, and eventually was sentenced to one to 15 years in prison on each second-degree felony count. But the prison term was suspended on all counts, and Alinas was placed on probation for 36 months.

The defendant spent 607 days in jail.

The convictions stem from an incident Jan. 21, 2004, when a reference librarian at the University of Utah's Marriott Library walked past a bank of computers and noticed the headline "Little Girls extreme" across the top of the defendant's computer screen, according to court documents.

The defense position throughout Alinas' case centered around the defendant's struggle with his gender identity. Those details were raised Wednesday along with other constitutional, procedural and professional grievances from the lower court trial.

Alinas said after the hearing he has struggled with his sexual identity for his entire life. For about the past 17 years, Alinas has dressed as a woman and presented herself as a woman in most aspects of her life. Her driver's license lists her as female and she tried hormones to develop breast tissue until she ran out of money.

Alinas has been unable to afford a sex change operation.

She asserts she was looking at the pictures with which she was caught to see what she would have looked like as a little girl.

"I was wanting the pictures for a nonsexual reason," she said Wednesday. "For my own peace of mind to make sense of my gender identity."

These issues were raised in the lower court. A summary of the issues raised before the state's highest court on Wednesday by Alinas' attorney, Ronald Fujino, included the following assertion: That the lower court did not properly instruct the jury on "sexually explicit conduct" in relation to depictions of children on which the case is based.

He also said Alinas' earlier attorneys should have worked harder to demonstrate that the pictures Alinas had were not in violation of what is allowable.

"Take a movie like 'Traffic,'" Fujino said of the film in which adults are portrayed as minors. With instructions similar to those given to Alinas' jury, those depictions would have been improper.

"Significantly, Lexis was not molesting children," Fujino wrote in documents to the court. "Much like a woman who first looks at sample pictures of nude breasts in anticipation of a breast implant operation, Lexis was studying pictures of female anatomy in furtherance of discerning (her) appearance if (she) could be born again female."

"Child pornography is inexcusable," Fujino told the court Wednesday. "It's wrong. We aren't arguing that at all."

But assistant attorney general Ken Bronston, who argued the case for the state, said legal precedent did not support any of the defendant's claims. He also dismissed the comparisons to medical textbook reference materials.

The depictions were of girls who looked to be age 6 to 10, he said. All but one were frontally nude and made up to look like adults. All had "coy" looks on their faces. "There's a whole lot more going on in these pictures than just genitals," Bronston said.

Judges said they would take the case under advisement and issue their ruling sometime in the future.

E-mail: lucy@desnews.com