Banned Photo Case: Court Ruling & Prosecution Halt

The case of spreading child pornography ended in a complete paradox. Mr. P. received prohibited pictures from another user on an erotic dating site, and for not deleting them, he left the court with a penalty. The man who sent them remained clean.

“It just started. A woman wrote to me, gave me an age. The purpose: sex or getting to know each other. And she offered to send me a photo. Why not. Well, it’s just that it wasn’t a grown woman, but a child.” This is how Mr. P. describes how he came into contact with a user pretending to be a woman on the erotic dating site Amatéři.com. He had no idea how the seemingly innocent communication would backfire on him. The editors know the full identity of the man, but due to the sensitivity of the case, they do not publish it.

Today’s episode of the In the Shadows podcast covers the development of the case over the last ten months.

Mr. P. was first accused, then indicted, and in October he was even convicted by the court of first instance for illegal possession of child pornography. The police found the images that he received from a user unknown to him at the time in a so-called instant message. He simply did not delete the photos, and even though the police found out that he himself did not distribute or publish them anywhere, he broke the law.

“He committed the misdemeanor of producing and otherwise dealing with child pornography and is sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment with a conditional suspension of eighteen months,” Judge Markéta Martincová of the Mělník court ruled against Mr. P. in October.

In the course of 2025, the In the Shadows podcast charted not only the various vicissitudes of the criminal proceedings involving Mr. P., but also the fate of the man whom the police in 2024 so-called as the perpetrator of the distribution of child pornography on the website Amatéři.com under the nickname danny_elbe. His real name is also mentioned in the police document, in the podcast we refer to him as Petra Š.

Due to the fact that the police mapped out who Petr Š. was sending the photos to, Mr. P also found himself in the police network. And as it turned out, he never got out of this trap – unlike Petr Š.

“It’s the will of power,” says the angry Mr. P., who, due to the delicacy of the whole case, did not talk about his problem with any of his family or friends. “The authorities simply needed some bull to convict. Today in court, people who abuse someone get terms. And I got it for just getting a few photos, I didn’t do anything with them. Unfortunately, I kept them in those messages.”

The case is interesting, among other things, because anyone who navigates similar websites can get into a similar situation. According to the owners of the dating site Amatéři.com, there are accounts for one and a half million Czechs and Slovaks.

Equally remarkable is the different approach of the same public prosecutor’s office – specifically in České Budějovice – to Mr. P. and to Petr Š. While Mr. P., the man who received the prohibited photos, was indicted and convicted, the Budějovice prosecutors stopped the case of Petr Š.

“The criminal proceedings were ended by a so-called diversion in the criminal proceedings, that is, by the decision of the public prosecutor on the conditional suspension of the prosecution and the subsequent decision on the certification in the probationary period of the conditional suspension of the prosecution,” said the district prosecutor from České Budějovice, Ivo Dvořák.

In other words: Petr Š. promised that he would not do a similar thing again, and during the observed period he really behaved decently, and today he is out of the problem. No punishment and no public shame.

In the case of Mr. P., the same representation sent the indictment to the court with a proposal for punishment.

How does the head of Budejovice prosecutors justify this paradox?

“Each case is evaluated individually,” says prosecutor Ivo Dvořák. “During the decision-making, not only factual actions and legal qualifications are addressed, but other facts are also taken into account, including the person of the perpetrator, how he proceeded with the actions for which he was prosecuted, and the like,” he added. As an example, he gave a full confession to the crime and remorse.

Let’s add that Mr. P. also wrote a confession on the recommendation of the České Budějovice public prosecutor, in which he expressed remorse and promised to contribute to a fund for victims of crimes. But then the public prosecutor’s office in Budějovice concluded that this case belongs to Mělník, where Mr. P. falls due to his permanent address – and Mělník judge Markéta Martincová measured with a strict yardstick.

The written confession even allowed her to decide on guilt and punishment without a trial, only through a so-called criminal order. In it, she sentenced Mr. P. to a sentence three times higher than that requested by the public prosecutor’s office (original proposal: imprisonment for four months with a conditional suspension of eighteen months, verdict: imprisonment for twelve months with a conditional suspension of two years).

Mr. P. did not agree to the criminal order – and therefore the judge ordered a trial. And in it, she herself reduced his sentence compared to the criminal order – to nine months’ imprisonment with a conditional suspension of one and a half years.

Why she did not recognize Mr. P.’s confession as a mitigating circumstance, she explained in the judgment as follows: “Mr. defendant stated in his testimony that he was delivered not only child pornography, but also pornography with a zoophilic focus from anonymous communicators. However, this was not found in the mailbox. The only preserved, found defective pornography was the child pornography.”

What is Mr. P. planning now and why does he advise people not to join erotic dating sites at all? How does an expert dealing with risky behavior on the Internet evaluate his case? And how do specific prosecutors and judges comment on the case? You will hear this in today’s episode of the show In the Shadows, which you can find at the beginning of this article.