A Hendrix College professor arrested on child-pornography charges has been cleared of wrongdoing, his lawyer said Tuesday.
The case against Duff Campbell, 61, was dropped after a detailed inspection of his computer equipment by authorities showed the math professor never looked for any illegal images and had never looked at the few questionable ones found, attorney Jeff Rosenzweig said.
To violate the child-pornography laws, the recipient of the images must deliberately view them, and Campbell never accessed any illegal photos, which was confirmed by the review of his equipment, the attorney said.
Court records show the charges were dropped last week.
Campbell, who joined the Hendrix faculty in 2000, has been on leave from the Conway college since his arrest in March.
Rosenzweig said the case would have been dropped earlier but the pandemic delayed the computer-review procedure.
Rosenzweig said there were only a few images alleged to be illegal among the "terabytes and terabytes" of legal material Campbell, a married father of two, had collected. A terabyte is 1 million million, the equivalent of 1,000 gigabytes.
The questionable images had been inadvertently captured by Campbell's equipment through a file-sharing program he used to search for legal material, Rosenzweig said. The pictures had only briefly been on his computer system, he said.
A Harvard University graduate and former West Point academy instructor, Campbell had been charged with two counts of possession of matter depicting sexually explicit conduct involving a child, a Class C felony that carries up to 10 years in prison.