VANCOUVER, January 21, 2002 (LSN.ca) – John Robin Sharpe, a notorious child pornographer who was first put on trial in 1996 after police twice raided his house to find photos of nude children and his own homosexual pedophile fantasy writings, is before the courts again. Sharpe successfully challenged the Canadian anti-pornography law and the ruling was upheld at the B.C. Supreme Court level, thus putting the law on hold until the case was taken up by the Supreme Court last year. The Supreme Court upheld the law, but weakened by permitting child pornography in personal stories and photos not for distribution.
During the current trial, which is expected to last three weeks, Sharpe will argue that his writings about having sex with boys are “art.” Sharpe’s lawyer, Paul Burnstein, who defended the rapist-murderer Paul Bernardo, said, “It’s probably one of the first times, if not maybe the first time in Canada, that the defence of literary merit will be raised to written child pornography materials.”
See the CBC coverage at: https://www.cbc.ca/cgi-bin/templates/view.cgi?/news/2002/01/20/porn_020120