I think you’re misunderstanding the ruling LJ. All it states is that images on the cache alone are not proof of intent. In this case, it had virtually no effect on the man’s sentencing as there was plenty of other proof that he had knowingly downloaded child porn.
And yes, it is incredibly easy to see things you don’t want to see on the internet. I called the FBI (who I believe blew me off) over a decade ago when I saw such images on an AOL message board. Those images were no doubt in my cache, so was I guilty of a crime?
Just fyi, I know of at least once instance where reading FR has resulted in users unwittingly being exposed to porn they did not wish to see. It was some website’s juvenile response to an innocent FRreeper hot linking images, and the mods quickly removed it, but still, that was an image that wound up the cache.
How can anyone tell the difference between accidentally cached images and purposely cached images?
And how many people have child porn on their computer that they don’t know about?