Doubting Thomas

That might have been anyone with a bit of computer savvy, as Loehrs determined. Thanks to the Trojans, a person didn't have to be in the Bandy home to be accessing the family's hard drive.

The prosecutor's computer "expert," Detective Larry Core of the county attorney's office, had never even bothered to check out the possibility of a virtual intruder.

"Did you find any viruses, evidence of any virus?" Novak asked, according to the transcripts.

"I didn't look," Core replied.

"Did you look for any evidence of hacking?" Novak asked.

"Nope," Core replied.

"Did you look for any evidence of back-door entries into the computer?"

"Nope," said Core.

Los Angeles-based computer expert Jeff Fischbach first started consulting on porn cases 11 years ago. He immediately assumed, he admits, that if someone was charged with possession of child porn, they were guilty.

But since that time, Fischbach has learned to make no assumptions. Viruses that allow remote access are on practically every hard drive, he says, yet few prosecutors bother to look for them and weigh their presence before throwing the book at a defendant. (Really, the only way most people can guarantee safety is to have a full-time IT expert, like most big companies. Long before the police showed up at their door, after all, the Bandys had asked their salesman at Best Buy how to make the computer safe, and followed his recommendations. Clearly, that was not enough.)

But despite what any outside party would likely consider reasonable doubt, good criminal lawyers have learned that they have little chance of winning over a jury, even with a virus-riddled hard drive.

Their only hope is to convince a prosecutor to be reasonable — to look for evidence of someone with a child porn problem, not just someone with a few random images on a pregnable hard drive.

"The minute you get these images before the jury, their ability to think about anything else is gone," says Fischbach, who has consulted on numerous cases. (He was not involved with either side on the Bandy case.) "At that point, somebody's responsible. Somebody's got to pay. The problem is, in that process, lives get ruined."

That very nearly was Matt Bandy.

He spent months wearing an ankle bracelet. He dropped out of high school because of the stress of trying to hide it from his classmates — and the stress of facing life in prison. His parents, who believed in his innocence from the beginning and never wavered, spent $250,000 on attorneys and experts.

Mindful of the fact that a jury trial could easily net 90 years in prison, Matt agreed in October to plead to lesser felonies: three counts of showing a Playboy around at school, when he was 16.

And he agreed to be registered as a sex offender — despite the fact thatthe report from the county's probation department decreed that Matt "doesnot fit the criteria for sex offender status" and recommended against it.

"I had to be in by 9 p.m.," says Matt. A tall, gawky kid who'd like to be the next Steven Spielberg, his quiet manner masks a dry wit.

"I couldn't have anything depicting a woman in a sexual manner — basically, I couldn't even have a Sports Illustrated with a cheerleader in it. I couldn't be around children. If I wanted to date anyone, I had to inform her on the first date what I'd done and take her to meet my probation officer."

Matt's probation officer, his mother says, insisted that if he wanted to accompany his family to church, he needed a signed letter from their priest, saying it was okay.

If a kid sat down next to him in the pew, Matt had to move.

"Have you ever had one of those dreams where nothing was making sense?" asks Jeanne Bandy, shaking her head. "This was literally a nightmare."

It was only Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Arthur T. Anderson who served as a voice of reason. In Matt's sentencing hearing on November 22, Assistant County Prosecutor Daniel Strange argued that the prosecution was being "generous" and stressed the presence of child porn on the Bandys' computer.

"I believe it's appropriate to monitor this young man's development and make sure that in the future there are no such pictures, pornography, adult or child, in his possession," Strange said.

"Okay," Judge Anderson replied, according to the transcripts.

"And I'll just note for the record," the judge continued, "as you were negotiating the plea agreement here, the reason why this agreement took place is because you couldn't prove the things you just alleged now, or else we wouldn't be here."