Ok, but it seems like a huge amount of work. If I was 17, "sexted" a naked photo of myself to somebody, and that person let it escape into the wild, it's tough to believe that an investigator somewhere is going to track me down and try to figure out how old I was when I took the picture, especially if I didn't reveal my face.

Eksreigh,

The government has an extensive database of all child pornography images ever seized. Yes, Uncle Sam has the biggest child porn collection of them all. Investigators could search for captured images in that database to determine if "borderline" images are or are not children.

Local police probably wouldn't have access to that sort of resource so, sadly, it is fairly likely that these images are of a nature that leaves little doubt.

From a technical standpoint, I wonder how you "scan" a computer’s hard drive for child porn. A photo of a naked 17-year old taken a week before the 18th birthday would be illegal, but the same photo taken two weeks later would be legal. How could an investigator determine the ages of anonymous people in the photos?
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There was something on E! a few years ago about a porn actress who starred in several adult movies before getting busted because she was only 17. When she was hired she fooled the studios with her fake ID. The industry had to quickly retrieve and destroy all her pictures and movies because they were considered child porn. Clearly, 17 is just as illegal as 7, but it seems there are degrees of the offense and from this article we don’t know the full story.

You know he will get away with hardly any punishment and will be out of jail in no time ruining people's lives.

I'll count backwards from 10 until the comments are shut off for this story

Why would comments be allowed in this story when they are disabled in the other story about this same case?

There are no laws on the books that are strong enough to punish this sicko. I say we turn him over to the parents of the children in the photos and let them decide his punishment.