Wow. They sent legal porn but claimed it was an underage persona, which made it legally the same as real child abuse and molestation. That's a very strange law.
It's to tackle potential defense strategies.
- No harm done, just drawings...
- No harm done, the person actually waiting in the motel room was of legal age.
etc.
The drawings one is weird. In the case of the "decoy" being of age, it doesn't matter because the person intended to abuse a child. But a drawing? It's disgusting but I don't see why it should be a crime.
Here are excerpts from a Canadian Supreme Court decision explaining the reasoning in a much better way than my previous summary. Reasoning is the same.
P38 The first issue is important because it governs whether the prohibition on possession is confined to representations of actual persons, or whether it extends to drawings from the imagination, cartoons, or computer generated composites. The available evidence suggests that explicit sexual materials can be harmful whether or not they depict actual children (...)
P43 (...)The question is this: would a reasonable observer perceive the person in the representation as being under 18 and engaged in explicit sexual activity?
P51 Family photos of naked children, viewed objectively, generally do not have as their “dominant characteristic” the depiction of a sexual organ or anal region “for a sexual purpose”. Placing a photo in an album of sexual photos and adding a sexual caption could change its meaning such that its dominant characteristic or purpose becomes unmistakably sexual in the view of a reasonable objective observer(...)
