Well this is kind of weird. Ampersand of Alas, a blog passes along one of those classic gotcha stories that combine double standards, overzealous prosecutors, and young people exchanging nude photography…

Reading, Pennsylvania: Where you get three years in prison for taking consensual nude pictures of your girlfriend, but cops who expose their penises in the office aren’t penalized at all.

From a pretty good link-roundup post here.

... that for some reason I foolishly started following links back through the story. And discovered that, as they say on Facebook, “it’s complicated.” There’s more to it than will fit in any two-sentence summary.

Let’s get the willy-waiving policeman out of the way first: According to The Agitator (the site Ampersand links to) a Pennsylvania police officer was reinstated after an arbitrator determined he was improperly fired because his employers (the police supervisor he exposed himself to?) didn’t follow “progressive disciplinary guidelines, which involve a series of verbal and written warnings.” (That would be “progressive” in the procedural rather than political sense.)

The child-porn conviction business, though, just keeps getting deeper and weirder.

Most surface/gotcha-level view of the story: man convicted earlier for possessing naked photos of his then-17-year-old wife is sent to prison for 3 years for failing to notify a sex-offender registry of a change of address. Extra irony/quirk/outrage/overreach/whatever: his now-adult wife and child they had together are now an impoverished single-mother family and will remain so till the husband gets out of prison around 2012. Ouch, right?

Well, yes, ouch. The next complication, though, from the Reading (Pennsylvania) Eagle after the man was originally convicted: in 2003 a 23-year-old man has a hotel-room party with his 17-year-old girlfriend who takes pictures of the two of them having sex, and of two other girls, 15 and 16, kissing, touching, and showering naked. Girlfriend swears she took the photos and made a photo album of them and then gave it to him.

Ok, that’s more complicated but still way more of a sorrow-than-anger situation. (Update: Making the very big assumption that since court and news reports don’t say otherwise that contact was limited to his fiance and she really did take all the photos. But in current comments Sungold is persuading me to lean towards her interpretation, in which case eww, and throw the book at him.)

Except there’s the next level complication: The man allegedly kept the photo album in his vehicle for a year. It didn’t turn up till he had a traffic accident and a police officer found the album in his car. Oh, and they didn’t just charge him with child porn they also charged him with providing alcohol to minor.

Yeah, I’m starting to feel a little sympathy fading too here. Tough, and all that, but still, WTF, right? Well, yeah.

It gets even more complicated though.

The police officer who found the photo album was the man’s brother in law (or possibly his step-brother.)

The brother-in-something held on to the album for a year before someone else on the police force found it in his desk. When police searched his computer they found 120 other photos of naked minors.

That too got complicated. The brother-in-something was charged with possession of child-pornograhy but, since the photo album was evidence against the original man he wasn’t charged for possessing that.

It gets even more complicated: first, it sounds like the man and his erstwhile partner are separated. So it’s not clear what’s going on with her. And comments by a local in one of the articles said the brother-in-something eventually escaped conviction, which sounds like a bit more of a scandal — the photos aren’t characterized but it doesn’t sound like they were of people he was involved with.

But wait! It gets even more complicated! The brother-in-something was actually convicted and sentenced to six months house arrest. For possessing those 120 computer photos. Oh, and peeping in windows. So there you go.

Meanwhile the original man, having served his original sentence, is still back in prison for three years under the state’s Megan’s Law provisions for failing to let authorities know he’d moved.

So end of the story? Yes, it’s scandalous that a different police officer was reinstated after exposing himself to his superior and a bystander.

And yes it’s on-balance unfortunate that the man went to prison a second time after serving what may have been a shorter first sentence for exercising what could only optimistically be called really, really, really bad judgment and somewhat more generously for canoodling with someone still a minor but past the age of consent and… her two minor friends who certainly weren’t. And not-at-all generously, for either getting minor children drunk, having sex with one of them, and taking and keeping naked photos with them, or, nearly as bad, getting drunk and naked with minor children and keeping the resulting photos. No really good way to spin that and… it’s not really clear why one would bother.

I’ve still got questions, though, about double standards on police vs. civilian conduct. Because one final Reading Eagle story, on the conviction of the brother-in-something adds one final complication. Turns out it wasn’t the brother-in-something who found the photo album in the first man’s truck after an accident. Instead some other officer found it and turned it over to the brother-in-something. Who put it in his desk. Where it was discovered a little more than a year later by someone else. Who, if I’ve got the chronology right, may actually have been investigating allegations of window peeping. But, having finally seen the light of day, resulted in charges against the original man for child porn, the brother for otherwise-unrelated child porn… but not withholding evidence… and… what?... disciplinary charges? Tampering with evidence charges? Nothing at all? ...for the officer who handed the photo album to the brother-in-law.

Point being that yeah, in its bare bones the story fits that two-line gotcha, “Reading, Pennsylvania: Where you get three years in prison for taking consensual nude pictures of your girlfriend, but cops who expose their penises in the office aren’t penalized at all.” But where the rest of the stories (I’m just a regular Paul Harvey, eh?) ought to raise even more eyebrows.