By Elizabeth Mohr

St. Paul Pioneer Press

When it comes to “revenge porn,” the law needs to catch up to technology, a state legislator says.

A recent Minnesota Court of Appeals ruling, dismissing a criminal case, said existing laws don’t address the emerging cybercrime.

So Minnesota Rep. John Lesch, DFL-St. Paul, who also is a prosecutor in the St. Paul City Attorney’s office, is assembling a group of attorneys, lawmakers and free-speech advocates to craft a law to deal with it.

“Revenge porn is a specific type of crime that needs its own law,” Lesch said Friday. “It can’t crawl under the parameters of a catch-all like criminal defamation or disorderly conduct.”

Revenge porn is the nonconsensual use of someone’s image online, often an intimate or sexual image, with the intent to humiliate or intimidate that person.

The issue has arisen in a digital era of smartphones.

Often in Minnesota, revenge porn cases are charged under the state’s criminal defamation statute. But the state Court of Appeals on May 26 ruled that the law is overbroad and unconstitutional.

“It’s a square peg, round hole problem,” St. Paul City Attorney Samuel Clark said. “That’s why a growing number of states are looking at this and creating new classifications of criminal conduct. We’ve used criminal defamation in the past, and now that is no longer an option, so we need to look at other options.”

To date, 17 states have crafted laws that attempt to address revenge porn crimes, according to Carrie Goldberg, a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based volunteer attorney with the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, which has a national campaign called “End Revenge Porn.”

Minnesota is poised to be next.

Lesch has asked 15 people, including Goldberg, to join the working group, which will have its first meeting by the end of June.

Lesch hopes to present a preliminary version of the bill during the upcoming special session, with hopes that a more refined version will be ready by the fall.

Revenge porn often is an extension of a domestic relationship and abuse, Lesch said, so the new law likely will fall under the same legal umbrella as domestic violence.

Not all states have organized their revenge porn laws the same way — some categorize it under privacy or unlawfulsurveillance laws, others under sex crimes — but it’s ultimately an issue of sexual consent, Goldberg said.

“But there is a significant relationship between domestic violence and revenge porn,” Goldberg said. “And it’s a tactic that’s used by abusers to both keep individuals in a relationship, to threaten to disseminate images if the victim leaves the relationship, and it’s used by offenders to punish the victim if they leave the relationship.”