People v. McKown

Defendant was convicted, after bench trial, of 1 count of predatory criminal sexual assault of a child,  2 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse, and 1 count of possession of child pornography. There was no independent evidence corroborating Defendant's confession that related to the specific event upon which 1 count of aggravated criminal sexual abuse, and thus that conviction runs afoul of the corpus delicti rule. Defendant admitted to creating and possessing "collages" that combined, in a sexually explicit manner, images of actual children cut from parenting magazines with images of adult male genitalia that he cut from adult magazines. These "collages" involve the alteration of innocent pictures of real children so that the children appear to be engaged in sexual activity, and thus pose reputational or emotional harm and fall within the definition of child pornography. (TURNER and CAVANAGH, concurring.)