Morton Berger

Morton Robert Berger (born July 2, 1951) is a former high school teacher from Phoenix, Arizona and a convicted child pornography collector. He was convicted in 2003 for possessing 20 pornographic images of children and sentenced to 200 years in prison without possibility of probation, parole, pardon or clemency. This sentence, which was the minimum available under Arizona law, was upheld by the Arizona Supreme Court in 2006. On February 26, 2007, the Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear a further appeal.

The crime Berger was a history teacher at Cortez High School in Phoenix. In June 2002, police got a tip that his credit card number had been used to buy pornographic images from a site hosted in Dallas. A raid on his home revealed a large collection of child pornography that he had collected over the previous six years. He was a member of the Wonderland Club porn-trading ring that required members to have at least 10,000 images in order to join. He was charged with 35 specimen counts of sexual exploitation of a minor, each charge relating to one image. After Berger turned down a plea bargain, prosecutors dropped 15 of the charges to avoid overwhelming the jury with lewd images. Under federal sentencing guidelines of the day, he would have faced a minimum of only five years in prison. Berger then appealed to the Arizona Supreme Court, which ruled on May 10, 2006.

Some of the justices were sympathetic to Berger's arguments. Vice Chief Justice Rebecca Berch described the mandatory minimum and consecutive sentencing rules, as well as the exclusion of probation, parole or pardon as a "triple whammy," observing that "it far exceeds the sentence imposed for similar crimes in any jurisdiction and exceeds the penalties regularly imposed in Arizona for crimes that result in serious bodily injury or even death to victims."

Despite its reservations, however, the Supreme Court, like the Court of Appeals before it, felt bound by precedent to uphold the sentence. It held that consecutive sentences which add up to very long sentences are not unconstitutional, provided that each of the individual sentences which comprise it are not themselves unconstitutional. The decision was virtually unanimous, with Berch concurring in part and dissenting in part.