FreeOctavius

Octavius Durdley's sentencing hearing is Oct. 29. Please write letters on his behalf. If you send them to

christopherj@lawful.not

they will go in the case file. Judge Winsor will take them into account in his sentencing.

Dear Judge Winsor, 

Was it Einstein who said, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over 
and expecting a different result"? 

This quotation applies to the further sentencing of Octavius Durdley.

Recall the case: Mr. Durdley downloaded gigabytes at a time, entire 
trees of directories and subdirectories of Japanese anime. At the time, the 
age of consent in Japan was 13. He said that when he found that he had
downloaded child pornography he would delete it. 

And in fact the trial testimony centered mainly on pornographic files found
on his hard drives by Detective Cummings using the program Encase, which 
was able to detect files that had been deleted but never overwritten. Most
of the thousand problematic files had been deleted so that Mr. Durdley 
(or anyone without specialized software) could not read them or know about them. 
Several hundred problematic files on Mr. Durdley's hard drives had not
been deleted. Some of these were shown to the jury. 

It was established in cross examination that these files had never been opened. 
They had been downloaded as part of a larger download a few weeks before the 
seizure of the hard drives. The time from initiation of a file download 
to last access was only a second or two, in other words no one opened the file. 

The easiest explanation is that Mr. Durdley was telling the truth when he said
that he did sometimes inadvertently download child pornography and when he 
found it he would delete it. These files were not deleted because he hadn't
found them yet. 

Those of us who believe him think it a miscarriage of justice that he has spent
15 of the last 16 years in jail.

At his last court appearance, leg ironed Octavius was too distraught and overwhelmed
to speak. He has for some time been too paranoid to sign anything and now he can't speak. 
It's insane to think that giving Mr. Durdley more years of incarceration will result
in anything other an intensification of his catatonia in the court room
and intensification of his unwillingess to cooperate with a a justice system 
he perceives as unfair. 

Insanity is believing that being harsher on Mr. Durdley
will result in some other outcome than lifetime incarceration.  
How to get out of this insanity? You're the judge and know better than I. 
But here's a couple of possibilities. 

Reduce the requirement for registering as a sex offender to 15 years from the 
2009 arrest. Limit the current sentence to time served. Let Mr. Durdley out free
of probation and of the justice system, a felon, no more time to serve.  
Short of granting Mr. Durdley a pardon and damages for time served, 
this would be the fairest option. 

Alternative. Instead of sending a dozen of armed police to arrest Mr. Durdley,
just send a single probation officer to talk to him.   His mother 
Betty would help track him down if he were at work. And could let 
the probation officer know if his residence, work, or car changed so 
that the probation officer could then contact Mr. Durdley.  
The contact  with the probation officer would satisfy the requirements 
of the law, would let Mr. Durdley live a free and productive life, 
and would save the taxpayer the considerable expense of further 
incarceration. 

Requiring a bit of extra effort from the probation officer would be unusual, 
but better than the insanity of keeping on with sentencing Mr. 
Durdley to more time and expecting a different result. Could be a precedent 
for saving tax payer money in similar cases of otherwise exemplary 
probationers who keep doing more time for not checking in. 

Thanks for your attention, 

Gary Howell, PhD 

Dear Judge Winsor,
I've been remiss in not looking earlier at the 2010 transcript of Octavius Durdley's
trial for possession of child pornography (on electronic media). Have you read it?
The following is a technical critique, concluding that more knowledgeable jurors
would not have voted for conviction.
First some credentials. I have a PhD in math from UF in 1986. I taught graduate and
undergraduate classes in math and statistics and CS at Florida Tech from 1986 to
2001, advising many theses in these subjects, and also publishing refereed journal
articles in computer science and statistics as well as math. From 2001 to 2003 I was
a scientific computing consultant for Compaq and HP,working with the US Army high
performance computing ERDC supercomputers. From 2004 to 2020, I was a computing
consultant and adjunct professor of computer science at North Carolina State
University, supporting the NC State supercomputing effort.
A big part of scientific computing is dealing with bulk downloads. Octavius Durdley
did bulk downloads. Did he intentionally download child pornography? Pages 163 to
198 of the trial transcript are of Mr. Durdley's attorney Nick Zissimopulos cross
examining Detective Cummings. If the jury had people with knowledge of bulk computer
downloads or statistics, they would not have convicted Octavius Durdley.
Much of Detective Cummings testimony had been about downloads using the program
LimeWire. He indicated that the file folder in which a file was stored would be named
by the the person downloading the file. So if a file was stored in a dsirectory with
a suggestive name, the person doing the download named the directory.
But it turns out the Mr. Durdley had downloaded his batches of files using
BitTorrent of which the detective stated he had little or no familiarity. On
BitTorrent the entire file structure is downloaded. Suggestive file names would
likely be buried far down the tree.
On pages 193 to 198, Detective Cummings admits that all the 327 child porn files on
hard disk 4, including the ones he had selected for jury viewing were downloaded
within a few minutes, and that the last time each file was touched was within a few
seconds of the time it was first created. In other words, no one had ever viewed them
after downloading.
Overall, fewer than one file in a thousand on hard drive 4 was child porn. The ones
that were child porn had been downloaded May 23 (about 3 weeks before the June 16
arrest of Mr. Durdley).
Mr. Durdley's consistent account was that when he found child porn he would delete
it. Not having deleted files three weeks old and inadvertently downloaded as part of
a multigigabyte download would be typical. Detective Cummings had spent a month of
work and 50 hours on Mr. Durdley's media to find these files, using specialized
software which Mr. Durdley did not have.
On the other 3 hard drives, the only child porn files found had been deleted,
according to Detective Cummings. Again this would be consistent with Mr. Durdley's
assertion he was not purposely downloading child porn but was deleting it when he
found it. Note that deleting removes the path to a file, so it is not accessible to
the user who deleted it, but the file is still there, and can be detected and viewed
by specialized software which Detective Cummings used. Would most people say that
deleted files are in one's possession? I think not.
Reading the cross examination, Detective Cummings established that Mr. Durdley had
not viewed the child porn on hard drive 4. He gave no indication (Mr. Durdley not
having access to the software that Detective Cummings spent 50y.
hours running on Mr. Durley's hard drives and CDs) that Mr. Durdley was even likely
to know it was there.
As a statistician, the low proportion of child porn files leads to the natural
question: was there more child porn in the almost a milion files on Octavius
Durdley's storage devices than in a random sample of as many files from the internet?
Not established or on the evidence likely.

Would downloading games and anime result in as much child porn as that found on Mr.
Durdley's media? Good thing for the prosecution the jury had no computer scientists
or statisticians!
So far Mr. Durdley has been incarcerated for more than fifteen of the last sixteen
years. His crime now is failure to register as a sex offender.
As the evidence does not support him ever having been a consumer of child
pornography, a wise judgement would be to relieve Octavius Durdley of the requirement
to register as a sex offender.
Let him contribute to society! And relieve taxpayers the expense of incarcerating
him.
Thanks for your attention,
Gary Howell, PhD Mathematics, UF 1986.