Yakov A. Jerkov

According to the report, Conradt's "CDs, laptop computers and cell phone all contained pornographic material -- some included child pornography".

Это сама Dateline и сообщила. В статье в Esquire, которую я цитирую, говорится прямо противоположное:

a forensic analysis of the laptop has verified that Bill Conradt was the person who chatted online with “Luke,” but that the computer hard drive was otherwise devoid of anything illegal or indicative of sexual predation

Это, собственно, не особо существенно, сам разговор с этим "Люком" -- уже преступление.

Честно говоря, я не понимаю - а почему полиция отказалась от возбуждения дел по арестованным в Техасе?

Из той же статьи в Esquire:

In the months following today, Doris Berry will review the cases the Murphy Police Department submits to her against the twenty-three men they arrested outside Dateline's decoy house, and she will find a variety of problems.

Some of the problems will be technical. For example, in most of the cases, she will find so-called venue problems. In order to pursue a case on an online-solicitation-of-a-minor charge, you’ve got to prove that either the suspect or the victim in the case was physically present in Collin County at the time the crime was committed. The location of the decoy house is irrelevant: What’s important is where the chat suspect and the chat decoy were when they were actually doing their chatting. But in sixteen of the cases that the Murphy Police Department will submit to her, Doris Berry will find it impossible to prove that either the Perverted Justice decoy or the suspect was inside Collin County when the crime was allegedly committed.

Some of the problems will be more fundamental: She will find that all of the arrests may have been illegal. Under Texas law, there are only certain circumstances under which a police officer can make an arrest without a prior warrant. But in all of these “To Catch a Predator” decoy-house arrests, it will come to light that not only was there no warrant but the police had done literally no prior investigation. Instead, they simply camped outside the decoy house and arrested the men who emerged after receiving a prior signal from the Dateline crew inside. The only thing Doris Berry won’t quite be able to figure out is whether this means that Dateline had become an agent of the Murphy Police Department or whether the relationship was the other way around. She’ll discuss this question with her boss, John Roach, the district attorney, and Roach will eventually form the opinion that “the Murphy Police Department was merely a player in the show and had no real law-enforcement position. Other people are doing the work, and the police are just there like potted plants, to make the scenery.”

The thing is, Doris Berry is a prosecutor. She wants to see bad guys punished. She’s read the transcripts, which means she knows most of these men are bad and a lot of them are probably dangerous. And if she rejects the cases, she knows what will happen: Instead of receiving the incarceration and supervision that might prevent them from someday soliciting real kids, not fake ones, they’ll receive only Dateline’s nationally televised shaming.

But the law is the law, and you can’t just wish a batch of mangled cases good.

On June 1, 2007, seven months after the end of the sting operation, three months after Dateline airs the relevant episode of “To Catch a Predator,” the Collin County District Attorney’s office will announce that it has decided not to pursue indictments for any of the suspects Murphy police arrested outside the decoy house.