The cost and complexity of mounting such a case was likely a deterrent. Ireland has prosecuted many people for possessing and distributing child porn but never someone accused of facilitating it through renting out servers to others, as Marques is accused of doing.
Nearly all of the evidence against him was gathered by FBI agents, meaning the use of such evidence in an Irish court would have been, at the very least, open to challenge. However, these obstacles would have been moot if the DPP accepted Marques’s offer, made shortly after his 2013 arrest, to plead guilty to the charges if prosecuted in Ireland.Marques’s reasoning for wanting to face trial in Ireland rather than the US is easier to figure out.
He is accused of renting out his vast network of servers to websites such as Lolita City and PedoEmpire which trade in the buying and selling of the most extreme forms of child abuse material. He is also alleged to have profited greatly from this activity, earning €1.15 million over a five-year period.
With Wednesday’s ruling, Marques has used up all his appeals, as the European Court of Human Rights has declined to hear his case.