Child porn law goes nuts: 14-year-old girl charged for nude selfie

Enlarge / Rice County Courthouse in Faribault, MN. (credit: AlexiusHoratius)

A 14-year-old girl is facing charges in Minnesota juvenile courts that could lead to her being placed on a sex offender registry-all for taking a nude selfie and sending it to a boy at her school. Prosecutors say that she violated Minnesota's child pornography statute, which bans distributing sexually explicit pictures of underaged subjects.

But a legal brief filed this week by the ACLU of Minnesota says that this is ridiculous. Charging a teenager for taking a nude selfie means the state is charging the supposed victim-an absurd result that the legislature can't have intended when it passed Minnesota's child pornography statute, the ACLU argues.

The case is being heard by a juvenile court in Rice County-about an hour south of the Twin Cities. Because this is juvenile court, there's a lot we don't know including the name of the teenager. We don't even know if the selfie in question was a photo or a video.

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