WHEREUPON,
ANDREW COLEMAN
WAS CALLED AS A WITNESS BY AND ON BEHALF OF THE STATE OF ARIZONA, AND, AFTER HAVING BEEN FIRST DULY SWORN, WAS EXAMINED AND TESTIFIED AS FOLLOWS:
THE COURT: State your full name, please, for the record?
DEFENDANT: Andrew Marcus Coleman.
Annette Fitzgerald, Defense:
Maria Sanchez, District Attorney, Questioning:
Q: Would you tell us your date of birth, please?
A: The ninth of January, 1997.
Q: So you are how old, today?
A: Eighteen.
Q: And you are still attending Sunport Senior High School?
A: Yes.
Q: Okay, so let's move on to the matter at hand. How long, approximately, have you been using the Internet- for anything, not only illegal activites?
A: I can't remember a time when I wasn't using it, honestly.
Q: So, it's safe to say at least since the beginning of junior high, correct?
A: Yes.
Q: Would you mind giving us a small explanation of how you first accessed the deep web? I know we did have the computer forensics expert testify yesterday, but I'd just like the jury to really understand how someone like you, an average computer user, was able to get to it as easily and often as you did.
A: Well, my friend David showed me how. He used a really little-known clearnet portal so we could get up to it on his school iPad and didn't have to be configure his browser to use Tor.
Q: And this would be Mr. David Smith you're referring to, right? And he guided you through the process of getting up to the deep web and showed you how to follow .onion links?
A: Yes.
Q: How old were you two when you when this occured?
A: It was early freshman year. I think I was fourteen and he was seventeen.
Q: And did David show you how to do anything illegal, specifically, accessing child abuse images or anything like that?
A: No. The first place David and I went to after the Hidden Wiki, which is this big directory of .onion links that everybody on the deep web goes to first, was Silk Road- this was back when it was still up, of course. It was for the thrills, because Silk Road was so well-known and we liked feeling like we were doing something we weren't supposed to. We saw those fake hitman sites and stuff, but neither of us looked at child porn or anything like that.
Q: To your knowledge, did any of your friends engage in any illegal activities on the deep web when they were alone?
A: No.
Q: Okay. Did they know about your, ahem, interests in illegal images?
A: I don't...no. They didn't know. I never accessed anything like that intentionally, anyways.
Q: You mean to imply that you saw the videos of children being abused and tortured accidentally?
FITZGERALD: Objection, that is a leading question.
THE COURT: Prosecution, please rephrase or retract the question.
Q: I'll just retract it.
THE COURT: Okay. Jury, disregard that statement.
YOU ARE READING
Darker Places
Short Story[#887 in Short Story- March 13, 2016] This is a story about the deep web, but it's more than that- this is a story about human beings. It's about the popular girl who stumbles into a world she never knew, the sick teenage deep web obsessive who's a...
