Legal thriller writer John Grisham (A Time To Kill, The Firm, Runaway Jury) has put his foot right in it after telling the Telegraph that viewing child pornography doesn’t necessarily make you a paedophile.

He said the American legal system has “gone crazy” by sending people who watch child porn to prison:

We have prisons now filled with guys my age. Sixty-year-old white men in prison who’ve never harmed anybody, would never touch a child. But they got online one night and started surfing around, probably had too much to drink or whatever, and pushed the wrong buttons, went too far and got into child porn.

Not sure what age or race has to do with it, but OK. He did clarify that he has no sympathy for people who actually sexually abuse children, but then told the story of a friend of his who served three years for “accidentally” downloading pictures of 16-year-old girls (his friend later said that he felt he DID deserve the punishment).

There’s so many of them now. There’s so many ‘sex offenders’ — that’s what they’re called — that they put them in the same prison. Like they’re a bunch of perverts, or something; thousands of ‘em. We’ve gone nuts with this incarceration.

Hmm. Not sure there’s anywhere on the planet where John Grisham could possibly win this argument (except maybe if he started rolling with the Black Power Paedophile Cult).There’s literally so much porn on the Internet that you’d have to actually make the effort to find something like kiddie porn, and the drunk excuse certainly doesn’t fly either. Sorry John, you’re on your own on this one.