Football Coach Takes the Field After Child Pornography Charges Dropped

By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma

Minnesota State football coach Todd Hoffner will get his job back and is looking to protect his privacy after a judge dismissed child pornography charges against him. Although it is not crystal clear what happened, it looks like overzealous human resources officials from the university found images and videos of Hoffner’s children on a work-issued mobile phone. They reported the images to the police, who escorted Hoffner off the field and arrested him. But the charges were dropped because the images were not, in fact, sexually explicit: they merely depicted Hoffner’s children playing after a bath. Non-sexual images of children are protected by the First Amendment and do not come under the Minnesota definition of child pornography.  According to a Washington Post blog, a judge then sealed the police investigative file to prevent a television station from obtaining the material, which was wrongly seized in the first place.