Editor’s note: If you have not read this series from the beginning, please go back to ‘Part 1’ and start there. David’s story is too important to miss any part of it.

David’s letter continues:

Before my sentencing, I wrote a letter to Judge Michael Moore pleading for leniency due to my responsibilities to my family, the medical issues we faced. I spelled out for him the issues that my son Henry and I had to contend with, and informed him that my wife Leigh struggles with severe lung damage due to a two month stay in the hospital with pneumonia. She also has Genetic Immune Deficiency, and Hepatitis ‘C’. I pointed out to the judge that she had no family to help her if she became ill and was unable to look after our boys.

Our business depended upon me and my contractor’s license to survive and if the business were to fail, our home would face foreclosure. In addition, and almost worse, would be the loss of the group health insurance that took care of my family’s many health issues. (It is all gone now…all of it)

I included letters from my neighbors stating that for twenty years I had been involved with their children and that they had been safe and had a healthy relationship with me throughout their lives.

I pointed out errors in the pre-sentencing investigation (PSI) that stated I was looking for child pornography. The report also stated that I would not accept responsibility for my actions. I said that while I KNEW child pornography was coming into my computer via the P2P software, I felt I was doing all that could be expected of me by simply deleting them as I came across them. I also took responsibility for what I had done, but I clearly pointed out that I would NOT be bullied into saying that I was interested in that crap.

I pleaded for him to give me any physical punishment he chose to, but not to remove me from my ability to look after my family and employees. Allow me to work for charities or, since I had hired ex-convicts over the years, allow me to set up some sort of training program for local inmates. I pleaded for him to give me anything he wished, but begged him to make it something productive.

Lastly, I gave him the government reports that I have briefly recapped here, hoping that he would see that what I said was true and realize that it all happened exactly as I had stated.

I don’t believe he ever read my letter or the reports. Maybe he just didn’t care.

At my sentencing, Judge Moore told me that he was sentencing me to twenty years as a warning to others. Ironic that the warnings to others which could have come BEFORE the fact had to come in such a devastating manner. Also ironic since he had just added his name to the growing list of government officials who were insisting that people should be warned about the dangers of P2P. To date, there has STILL been nothing done to protect the children who use P2P, or to warn families that something this destructive could happen to them just as easily as it happened to me and MY family.

It was February of 2012 when I knelt down in front of my home of over 20 years and held each of my children, Henry, Ty, and Sam, not knowing when, or IF, I would ever see any of them again. I knew when I hugged my 90 year old father and told him “Goodbye” that it was the last time I would ever see him. The pain of saying goodbye to Leigh, knowing the difficulties she would now face alone, cannot be described.

I was about to enter a federal prison, be labeled a sex offender for life, and classified as a violent criminal because I had received child pornography over a 3 month period in 2011. TWENTY YEARS for using a LEGAL computer program that had been monitored and allowed to operate for many years, even though the government allowed it to operate with the full knowledge that there was a 60% chance that ANY user – man, woman, adult, or child – would receive illegal material.

My first night in prison, I shared a cell with a man who had robbed a bank with a loaded gun. Because he had never been in any trouble, and because he had a drug problem, with a drug rehab program and his ‘good time’, he would be released in seven years, with 5 years’ supervised release. With my ‘good time’, and no time off for drug rehab, since I have never taken illegal drugs, I will leave prison in 18 years at the age of 71, with lifetime supervision, classified as a sex offender, and as a violent criminal.

That is if I make it out of prison.

I am over a thousand miles away from my family. There are at least 2 ‘low’ security institutions in the state of Florida. I have not seen my family since I left them in February of 2012. I share a small converted TV room with 14 other men. (Editor’s note: David has since moved out of the ‘fishbowl’, as it is called, and into a 2 man cell) As I sit here writing this letter, I have a scar over my right eye due to being attacked by an inmate I had never met before. This was not the first time I had been hit, but this time I had unknowingly sat down in this man’s ‘spot’. I am labeled as an ‘S.O.’ (sex offender), but prison talk refers to those like me as ‘Cho-Mos’, which is short for child molester. Sex offenders are threatened and bullied, forced to shower at specific times, and must stay in specific places to watch TV or to sit in the dining hall. I live a daily life of threats, as well as physical and mental abuse. I have been spit on and I am looked down on by drug dealers and bank robbers.

Until I met Leigh, I spent most of my life alone, but in prison, someone who is quiet, and without friends, as I am, is considered weak and fair game for abuse and humiliation. There is just so much anger here. It’s very hard for me to understand it.

As a child working on my Grandmother’s farm in Kentucky, I found something I was good at – hard work. It gave me direction and a sense of completion I had never had before, if that makes sense. Then I discovered heating and air-conditioning and I have worked in that for 37 years, building my own business from nothing into a mid-size, well-respected company that people knew they could rely on and trust.

Now, I ‘work’ in the HVAC department of the prison, but it is not at all productive or meaningful and I believe I am simply going to waste away in the system. Why? Is this what ‘justice’ is all about?

I wonder if Congress gave any thought to the effects their decisions to label people as sex offenders would have on their ability to function as productive members of society. Even if a miracle occurred and I could go home tomorrow, I still could not work in my field. I have lost my contractor’s license, and who wants a sex offender working in their home anyway? In addition, I would not be able to take my children to a park or walk them home from the school bus. Drug dealers and bank robbers get a second chance, but I am labeled a deviant to be watched for the rest of my life.

This justice system knows I am not a danger to children. They KNOW this. I was free to walk around before my trial, and even after being found guilty I was still allowed to remain free until I was sentenced. If I was so dangerous, would I have been allowed to remain free? Does that sound like they considered me to be a threat? Not ONCE did anyone ever interview me or any member of my family to arrive at anything that resembled the real truth about who I was and how I treated my family, neighbors, and employees.

My government is broke, yet they hand out twenty year prison sentences as if they were candy, providing a constant stream of wasted lives into a system that is already overcrowded.

When I arrived in prison I received material from the government telling me that children who grow up without a father in the home are 5 times more likely to turn to drugs and suicide, and 20 times more likely to be sent to prison when they grow up.

How can our justice system know all of this and still feel justified in giving me a twenty year sentence? Call me naive, and stupid, for sure, but to do this to a man who is a productive member of the community, has NEVER been in trouble; to take this parent away from his very dependent children; to take this businessman away from so many people who counted on him for their very livelihood; to do this as a “warning’ to others when WARNINGS could have prevented this from happening in the first place is WRONG!

I was smart enough to recognize that P2P was too dangerous for my children to use, but too stupid to see that using it in what I thought was a responsible manner could destroy my entire family, business, and all that I hold dear to me.

The government was smart enough to recognize that P2P was a serious problem, but has done NOTHING with that knowledge besides destroy lives!

David’s letter will continue…….

Editor’s note: If you have not read this series from the beginning, please go back to ‘Part 1’ and start there. David’s story is too important to miss any part of it.

David’s letter continues:

The federal government charged me with “distribution of child pornography” because P2P makes whatever you have available to others, even though I never knowingly shared ANYTHING with another individual. The U. S. Attorney who was prosecuting the case offered me a plea bargain. If I would plead guilty, instead of the maximum of TWENTY YEARS, they would ‘only’ sentence me to SEVENTEEN! I was shocked, but I was also saddened that they would so easily destroy me and my family, and for what? Free movies and songs? Told that the government wins 97% of the time, I still had no choice but to go to trial and hope that a jury could be made to understand that this was all a tragic mistake and that I was NOT an evil person. I believed (there is that problem with ‘trust’ and being ‘naive’ again) that certain facts would come out in court and the jury would realize how this all happened.

Following are some of the points I thought would help make things obvious to the jury and demonstrate that my actions were innocent, even if those same actions were technically in violation of the law. It was my hope that the jury could be made to see that those laws were designed for people who INTENTIONALLY trafficked in this filth, and that I was NOT one of them:

• The prosecution knew that everything I had told them about P2P was true and had been documented years earlier in the reports I mentioned.
• The prosecutor knew that the local detective, who was the government’s ‘expert’ witness, would testify under oath that he believed I was unaware I was breaking the law, and he also believed I had no intention of sharing that material with others.
• The prosecutor was aware that the only child pornography that ever entered my computer was that which was misleadingly labeled and obtained through the P2P software, a defective software which gave consumers unwanted illegal material, as had been documented in several government reports, and was allowed to operate for over twenty years with no warnings to the public, even though such warnings were recommended in some of those same reports! The software companies said “No!” to those warnings and the U.S. Congress and Federal Trade Commission did nothing.
• That I did not put anything on the Internet myself, nor did I ever try to conceal anything that ever came into my computer. I simply deleted the material and put it in the ‘wastebasket’ with the ‘trash’, which is what it was, and is.
• That this software could give ANY average user enough unwanted material in ONE DAY that, with today’s laws, could net a TWENTY YEAR sentence to someone like me who has never been in any sort of trouble in his life.
• I had never used the popular ‘search’ terms used by known pedophiles and predators to locate child pornography on P2P.
• The files that came into my computer that began the investigation had all been deleted long before they ever came to arrest me.
• I had not tried to hide my activities or my actions because, again, my misguided logic kicked in and told me I WAS doing the right thing by simply discarding the trash that came in unwanted and uninvited.

In the course of the trial, the U.S. Attorney’s office went through tremendous effort and expense to prove me guilty of something that I readily admitted to, although NOT for the reasons, and with the intent, that they implied and wanted to destroy my family’s lives for. Since I didn’t use any of the ‘common’ search terms, they brought in an ‘expert’ from CALIFORNIA who testified that “Lord Of The Rings”, which was a search term I had used was a term used by some people looking for child pornography. How was I supposed to know that? When I typed in “Lord Of The Rings” I was looking for the MOVIE because my family wished to watch it.

Another detective testified that most of the material that came into my computer had originated on a site called “Stickam” a website I knew nothing about, but which I learned through the detective’s testimony is a legal website. The website apparently existed for one purpose: For people to upload their private videos for others to view. He testified that there was much illegal material on this so-called ‘LEGAL’ website that had, amongst its 9 MILLION members, children of all ages, as well as adults. When he was asked why the operators of the website were not required to monitor and censor the content on its website as were the operators of “YouTube”, the detective simply stated “I don’t know”. Asked, since users must give their email address in order to become members, could law enforcement track down those belonging to children and notify their parents of what their children were involved in, his answer was “Yes, they COULD do that”, but when asked why authorities did NOT do that, he could only respond, “I don’t know”.

I found it difficult to explain to the jury why I would continue to open these files even though I knew that many of them contained offensive, or illegal, material and some of it depicted children being sexually abused. The jury watched some of the videos which were recovered from the hard drive. As most of us are aware, deleting something doesn’t make it go away completely, but I never worried about it because I felt I was doing the right thing. I refused to watch the videos they were shown. My lawyer watched the jury and made note of the ones who were crying. I regret not telling the jury that I never watched any of the videos long enough to cry. I probably would have, as I am a loving parent and would never think to hurt a child, but I simply channeled through the files and instantly knew if something I opened was what I was looking for.

Congress had it right when they reported that innocent search terms returned files with offensive material at a rate as high as SIXTY PERCENT! It makes one wonder why MILLIONS of ordinary Americans used, and continue to use, P2P with all of its issues, and all of its dangers. Speaking for myself, it had everything to do with my limited time, and it was not complicated to operate. P2P was easy to use, could be left to run on its own, and would deposit everything in one, easy-to-find spot on my computer. No wasted time wandering the internet. Once a week I would make a folder, move the files that had come in into that folder, and then go through them when time permitted.

For six years I did this, feeling no pressure or time constraints checking out the files, and though I deleted so many folders, and thousands of types of files over the years, I did not know that what I had deleted, or how I had used P2P, would come to destroy everything that I hold dear.

The trial lasted only two days, but it took the jury an additional THREE days to find me guilty. It was obvious that they struggled, but what could they do? I had, after all, opened the files in question. The government reports were never brought up in court, nor was it permissible to inform the jury that a guilty verdict would net me a TWENTY YEAR sentence and destroy my life, my business, and my family, in addition to putting 15 people out of work. (Editor’s note: I simply have to interject here that I believe that had the jury any IDEA of what would happen, they never would have found David guilty. This is not strictly conjecture on my part as a federal judge in New York polled a jury AFTER he delivered a mandatory ten year sentence involving child pornography and 7 said that knowledge would have caused them to reconsider and 3 stated that it would have definitely caused them to vote NOT guilty.)

I had hoped that they would see innocence, and not guilt; stupidity, and not evil. Throughout my life I have been told that I have difficulty seeing the whole picture, and that may be true. I also have the tendency to concentrate only on what is in front of me, but it is the only way I can function through my disabilities. However, if you examine my actions closely, you will see that I used the software in exactly the manner in which it was designed. I never had any motives for using P2P other than finding movies and songs for my family to enjoy. If I had any idea I was engaged in illegal activity, I would never have allowed my employees to use it, nor would I ever have spoken with my wife about the crap that accompanied the files I was actually looking for. My actions were stupid, but innocent.

Now that I was found guilty by the jury, I turned my attention to the judge and began to prepare for sentencing. I hoped that I would find compassion, understanding, and fairness….all of the components of JUSTICE….when he sentenced me.

Again, I was to find out that I was very mistaken.

David’s ‘letter’ will be continued……

Editor’s note: If you have not read this series from the beginning, please go back to ‘Part 1’ and start there. David’s story is too important to miss any part of it.

Additional Editor’s Note: David refers to his son Henry’s medical and mental issues, as well as his own. As part of his letter, David prepared a little synopsis of those conditions and the person or places where they were receiving, or had received, treatment. He also included excerpts from the medical reports regarding those illnesses and aliments. I include them now to help the reader understand a little better the problems faced by David and his family.

The following information was provided by David:

Medical Information for Henry Christopher Hayden:

Miami Children’s Hospital

3100 SW 62nd Ave.

Miami, FL 33155  (305) 666-6511

Diagnosed with Ataxia Telangiectasia (A-T) at the age of 3. A-T is a hereditary, progressive, neurodegenerative disorder. Continual loss of cells in the cerebellum of the brain and DNA. Damage accumulates and leads to the death of cells in the central nervous system. The three most common causes of death are: Cancer, infection, and progressive lung failure.

• Henry also is diagnosed with physical and mental disorders, and Attention Deficit Disorder
• Henry has no life skills and will require special care throughout his life
• Life expectancy 14-24 years. Henry is 16.

Medical Information for David Frederick Hayden:

Bascom Palmer Eye Institute

7101 Fairway Dr.

Palm Beach Gardens, FL  33418

Beaches MRI

2701 PGA Bl.

Palm Beach Gardens, FL  33410

• Tumor behind left eye wrapped partially around the optic nerve
• Unable at this time to proceed with a biopsy due to location of tumor
• MRI and examination was due on February of 2011 but was cancelled due to being sentenced to prison
• Has not been examined since arriving in prison
• Diagnosed at early age with Autism and Attention Deficit Disorder

The body of David’s letter continues:

In 2011, I received a visit from a local detective at our small heating and air-conditioning business which Leigh and I owned. I was informed that in the last 3 months they had monitored child pornography coming into the building using P2P software. I was surprised that he only said 3 months since I had been using the software for 6 YEARS and this had been a problem since the beginning. I expressed my surprise, and my lawyer later expressed HIS surprise that I would volunteer the information that I had been receiving these unwanted and unasked for files for 6 years.

You have to understand how my mind worked relating to all of this: I had heard about this software from a national news show, I never doubted that I was using a legal program, and accepted without question that from day one this is the way the system operated and that the authorities knew this material was on there. If I had been doing something wrong all those years, my mind would simply not process WHY this software was allowed to continue to operate, and why in the world hadn’t someone said something to me or come to see me six years before?

I know I am slow, but I just could not understand why they were there, but then he asked me why I was looking for child pornography. I was surprised that he asked me that, so I said I was NOT looking for it, and that he must know that ANY search can bring with it that type of material. I was certain that he must know that the titles and descriptions were continually misleading and incorrect and that the only way to determine what WAS in the file was to open it, even if it was only opened very briefly, which was the case with every file that was inappropriate.

Asked why I did not recognize that child pornography coming in through the P2P software was illegal, I could only answer that it had never crossed my mind that I was doing anything wrong because I didn’t ask for, search for, or desire any of the material in question. I realize now that this may sound naive, careless, or insensitive, but I never felt any connection to, or involvement with, any of that material since I had not requested it in the first place and all I did was delete it when I saw what it was. Seeing those files was like seeing undesirable things on television to me. When I got to something that was inappropriate or unpleasant, I just channeled through. I have never understood why much of the material that was allowed on TV was allowed to be there, and I viewed the filth that was coming in with the P2P files in the same manner: I assumed that the government agency (whatever that was) that monitored and determined what is allowed on TV and the Internet ALLOWED P2P to operate the way it did.

I had read several government reports that addressed child pornography on P2P sites and it seemed that they were well aware that this material was being attached to legitimate search requests. I also assumed that since the government allowed these sites to operate that it must be the way business was done. I simply thought that as long as I did not keep any of the material that I was not looking for in the first place, I was not doing anything wrong.

Some of the reports are as follows:

2003, United States House Of Representatives 108th Congress (Serial #108-8). This report discusses the ease of access to child pornography and of juvenile users accessing child pornography on the P2P file-sharing networks. Highlights from that report include:

• Using three ‘innocent’ search terms that would likely be used by juveniles (Power Rangers, Pokémon, and Britney Spears), it was found that of the files returned, SIXTY PERCENT of them were pornographic, including child pornography.
• Things that seem harmless in terms of their description are, in fact, way over the line, but this is not known UNTIL they are downloaded and opened.
• There are no warnings whatsoever. Consumers think that they are downloading something that is decent and they are often quite surprised at what actually appears on the screen before them.

2005, United States Federal Trade Commission reports the risks related to what consumers using P2P may face:

• Consumers, INCLUDING CHILDREN may experience inadvertent and unwanted exposure to inappropriate materials.
• Consumers may UNKNOWINGLY distribute files containing pornography, including child pornography, thereby exposing themselves to potential criminal liability.
• Consumers face numerous risks when downloading and using file sharing software (P2P). The government should play a role in decreasing these risks through consumer education, and encouraging industry self-regulation.

2006, U.S. Department Of Justice, Office Of Community Oriented Policing Services Specific Guides Series No. 41 (page 36, under the heading “Prioritize Their Efforts”); “Because of the volume of internet child pornography crime, police forces need to prioritize their efforts and concentrate on the most serious offenders, particularly those actually involved in abusing children and producing pornographic images. It has been noted that success in combating child pornography is too often judged in terms of the number of images recovered, rather than by the more significant criterion of whether the crimes the images portray have been prevented.

My actions did not mean that I condoned, or approved of, child pornography. My actions simply reflected my horribly misguided logic: 1) The government was aware of the problems with P2P as those problems related to illegal child pornography and other inappropriate material; 2) The government indicated there was nothing they could do to prevent this material from being innocently accessed; 3) The government allowed the P2P networks to continue to operate; 4) I trusted the government and felt that as long as I did not keep the unwanted material I was not breaking any law.

The detective took the one computer in question and left my place of business. After he left, I began to wonder HOW I could have been so naive all of those years? I was certain, though, that they would see that I was telling the truth, and that if I had been interested in, or searching FOR that filth, I would have had hundreds of files on my computer, which I did not. All that was there were files that had been deleted as soon as their content was revealed.

I would find out just how wrong I was months later when the State Of Florida notified us that they were not going to prosecute me………….but the Federal Government WAS.

David’s ‘letter’ will continue….