John Robin Sharpe

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

John Robin Sharpe (born circa 1933) is a Canadian citizen noted for successfully challenging several portions of Canada's child pornography laws. He was also the first Canadian citizen to mount a successful constitutional challenge without legal representation. A retired city planner from Vancouver, British Columbia, prior to his well-publicized legal wrangling Sharpe had been a published writer (in the homosexually-themed magazines Passport and Sodomite Invasion Review), a world traveler, and an advocate for the legalization of recreational drugs and sexual relations between adults and minors. His written works follow the transgressive traditions of Marquis de Sade and D.H. Lawrence.

Sharpe was arrested and charged with two counts of possessing child pornography and two counts of distributing child pornography in 1995 after police raided his apartment and found photographs of adolescents involved in sexual activity and journals and manuscripts depicting fictitious adolescents engaged in sexual activity. In January 1999, he was acquitted of the charge of possession of child pornography by the British Columbia Supreme Court and, in May 1999, the British Columbia Court of Appeal upheld the ruling by a 2-1 vote. The Court of Appeal stated that current child pornography laws "[are] truly one step removed from criminalizing simply having objectionable thoughts." Shortly thereafter, British Columbia appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada which, in the landmark ruling of R. v. Sharpe in January 2001, upheld most of the child pornography law but said that people can't be prosecuted for creating works of their own imagination for their own use.

The case went back to the British Columbia Supreme Court which ruled in March 2002 that Sharpe was not guilty of possession of child pornography related to his sexually explicit writings but was guilty of two counts of possession of pornographic pictures of children. He was sentenced to four months of house arrest. British Columbia Supreme Court Judge Duncan Shaw condemned Sharpe's writings as "morally repugnant" but defended them as within Sharpe's legal rights because they "[did] not actively advocate or counsel the reader to engage in the acts described" and had "artistic merit". The ruling angered many family and child advocacy groups who claimed the "artistic merit" defense would open the door to wide-spread distribution of child pornography and limit the abilities of police forces to crack down on actual child exploitation, therefore placing children at risk.

Later in 2002, Sharpe was arrested again on the charges of gross indecency and indecent assault stemming from abuses which took place from 1979 to 1982. Pictures of the sexually abused teenager, who was aged 11 through 14 during the assaults, were among the over 500 for which he had been previously charged. In 2004, Sharpe was found guilty of indecent assault and sentenced to two years in prison, which he has promised to appeal. He has maintained that the boy was never harmed and wanted to have sex. During the trial, the victim said, "I like Robin, but if somebody did that to my kids, I'd want to kill him."