Charges dismissed in child-porn case

The Association Press

ST. LOUIS -- Because of an investigator's misstep, the government has abandoned prosecution of a St. Louis County man who had admitting possessing child pornography.

The prosecution of Gregory Strauser arose from the federal "Operation Candyman" investigation.

U.S. Attorney Ray Gruender cleared Strauser on Friday, the same day the Justice Department dropped a New York child pornography case also called into question because an FBI agent used false information to get a search warrant.

Last month, federal trial judges in St. Louis and New York threw out evidence in both cases -- moves that prosecutors had appealed until Friday.

"Without the evidence being admissible, there was no chance of succeeding in the prosecution," Gruender said.

In pleading guilty last September to six felony counts of possessing child pornography, Strauser, 52, admitting that he had numerous images of child pornography on CDs seized from his home by the FBI in January 2002.

But he later withdrew the plea and challenged the evidence.

Details of Operation Candyman were announced in March 2002 by Attorney General John Ashcroft. The investigation was aimed at members of three Internet discussion groups on Yahoo! Inc.'s Web site, including one called "Candyman."

But an FBI agent in Houston, Geoffrey Binney, said in an affidavit for search warrants used in various cases that every subscriber to the Candyman site on the Internet automatically got e-mails of child pornography redistributed by the site.

Prosecutors later acknowledged that that claim was false, given that subscribers could turn off that feature. Strauser, it turned out, had the feature off at the time Yahoo! shut down the site in 2001.

Binney has since left the FBI and practices law.

In February, the Rev. John Hess, a Roman Catholic priest from the St. Louis suburb of Florissant, used the same issue to negotiate a lesser sentence after the FBI used a search warrant to seize a computer from his church. That computer contained child pornography images.