This Principal Investigated a Sexting Incident. So the Police Charged Him With Possessing Child Porn.

Bradley Bass is facing 12 years in prison, despite the fact that he was doing his job as a school administrator.

A Brush, Colorado, man is facing 12 years in prison for possessing child pornography. Even more fraught is that no one, including the government, thinks he had child pornography.

At least not in any traditional sense. Bradley Bass allegedly ran afoul of state law when he was found with explicit images of a local girl. But the 32-year-old high school principal came to have those photos in the course of a school sexting investigation carried out as a part of his job. The girl says she isn't a victim of Bass' and both she and her parents have pled with law enforcement to stop the prosecution.

Those requests have fallen on deaf ears. The law criminalizes possessing such photos, even if someone comes to have them while conducting a probe. There is one notable exception, however: "peace officers or court personnel in the performance of their official duties." In other words, when law enforcement carries out such an investigation, it's OK. When Bass carried out a similar investigation, he was hit with the potential of more than a decade behind bars, sex offender status, and the loss of his kids and job.

Bass' story is a case study in how such broad laws can be weaponized arbitrarily. Until September, he was not the only one in his unenviable position: The government charged Scott Hodgson, another administrator in Brush, with eight counts of child pornography for his part in the same investigation. Thirteenth Judicial District Judge Charles Hobbs dismissed those charges in September.

"Obviously, the manner in which the evidence was preserved, while technically complying with the school policy, appears to have violated state law," he said, according to The Colorado Sun.

But Bass, who the government views as the primary culprit, has not been so fortunate. His case has been the subject of several hearings in the same judicial district, one of which is taking place today, with law enforcement insisting that prosecuting the case is about community safety. "These images were illegally collected by Bass, then uploaded to the school's computer network, when the school conducted an in-house investigation of sexting between juveniles," the Brush Police Department said in a statement in June, shortly after the men were arrested. "Our goal, in this case, and every other like it, is to contain and stop the spread of such images so that the victimization of our precious children stops."

The police did not need to stop the spread of the images, because they weren't spreading. In April, Bass received a tip about student sexting; an investigation found explicit photos sent to several schoolchildren. Those images were saved on Snapchat, an app where images typically disappear after they're sent. Bass took photos of the kids' phones with his work device, reports the Sun, and then uploaded them to a server maintained by the school. It did not violate school policy to do so in the course of such a probe.

In what is perhaps a tacit admission of the weakness of its case, law enforcement has offered one alternative: Bass can plead guilty to obstructing justice, a much lesser charge than the ones he's currently facing. That's hard to swallow, though, when you know you didn't do anything wrong.

"The plea they're offering potentially lets me stay as a husband and a dad, and to me those are the biggest priorities in my life," he said. "I basically need to choose: Do I want to clear my name and risk losing my entire life, or do I want to not clear my name but not lose my life?"

It's a ridiculous question. And it's one that many defendants before have had to ask themselves, thanks to a plea bargaining system that allows prosecutors to overcharge and coerce people out of exercising their constitutional right to trial. Take our deal and have a misdemeanor conviction. Refuse, and go to prison for years, lose your life, lose time with your kids.

The delta between those two options is wide for a reason. It's not that prosecutors actually think Bass needs to go to prison for more than a decade; they also almost certainly don't believe he needs to be branded a lifelong sex offender. If they believed those things, they wouldn't offer the deal. But charging him the way they've done gives them an almost laughable amount of leverage in securing a conviction against someone whose own victim says he was just doing his job.