An Alabama man convicted of possessing child porn more than a decade ago can live with his underage son, a federal judge in Tuscaloosa ruled.

Bruce Henry, a Tuscaloosa County man who served nearly six years in prison and five years of supervised release after pleading guilty in 2013, challenged a provision of Alabama law barring adult sex offenders convicted of a sex offense involving a child from residing or living overnight with a minor.

Henry filed his challenge in 2021, when he and his wife had a son.

In ruling in Henry’s favor, U.S. District Court Judge R. Austin Huffaker called the provision’s scope “breathtaking,” adding that the “[n]o other state has crafted or enacted such a broad, unyielding rule in this context.”

“The statute treats all sex offenses involving a child the same, including child pornography offenses. It applies equally to, for example, a 19-year-old male college freshman convicted for downloading sexually explicit content of his 16-year-old high school girlfriend, to the worst of the worst offenders—like one who trafficked and raped children,” Huffaker wrote in his ruling issued Wednesday.

“If convicted, and based on that conviction alone, both of those individuals would be subject to [the provision] for life, without relief, no matter the circumstances that led to the conviction, regardless of how the circumstances may have changed in the months, years, or decades following the conviction,” the judge wrote. “These extremes reveal the statute’s core infirmity: it relies on the mere fact of conviction in perpetuity, despite the varying elements attendant to the several independent crimes considered sexual offenses involving a minor.”

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall indicated in court filings that he would appeal the ruling to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.

The attorney general’s office could not be reached on whether Marshall is also asking for a stay of Huffaker’s ruling while an appeal plays out, but Huffaker wrote that he would entertain such a motion if it is filed.

In siding with Henry, Huffaker quoted another judge’s ruling in another case involving the Alabama Sex Offender Registration and Community Notification Act:

Alabama “can prosecute sex offenses to the full extent of the law. It can also act to protect its citizens from recidivist sex offenders. . . . [But] once a person serves his full sentence, he enjoys the full protection of the Constitution. Sex offenders are not second-class citizens, and anyone who thinks otherwise would do well to remember Thomas Paine’s wisdom: ‘He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.’”