[The Pro Circuit] More Fun with Federal Prosecution
On reading this article, you might think the Blowfish sex industry column has been hijacked by the topic of obscenity prosecution. Sadly, it’s starting to look like that. But the developments in some of these cases are just too bizarre and interesting to pass up.
Take, for instance, this weekend’s news on the Ira Isaacs federal obscenity trial. It has all the elements of a good Grisham thriller — bestiality, scat, and possible jurist malfeasance. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Ira Isaacs is a Los Angeles based producer of pornographic material who was indicted by the feds for the sale of four titles: Gang Bang Horse Pony Sex Game, Mako’s First Time Scat, Hollywood Scat Amateurs No. 7 and Avantgarde Extreme.
The case came to an end, or maybe not, when the judge in the case, federal appeals court judge Alex Kozinski, recused himself from the case and declared a mistrial (or maybe didn’t). The reason? The Los Angeles Times had broken the news that Kozinski, a conservative nominated by Ronald Reagan, and someone who has been mentioned as a possibility for the Supreme Court, maintained a website with pornographic material.
Getting to the bottom of exactly what was posted and why it was posted is a strange endeavor at best. Kozinski’s site, predictably enough www.kozinski.com, returned a 404 error at press time, denying your correspondent the opportunity to enjoy, as reported by the Times via Wikipedia, “a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows, a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal, images of masturbation and public and contortionist sex, a slide show striptease featuring a transsexual, a series of photos of women’s crotches as seen through snug fitting clothing or underwear, and content with themes of defecation and urination.” Referencing the Times, Wikipedia also tantalizingly comments that “Kozinski agreed that some of the material was inappropriate, but defended other content as ‘funny.’”
Funny? Women painted like cows, guys “cavorting” with farm animals, defecation? I know I personally just gave myself a hernia. The Times reported that other nonsexual items posted on the site could potentially be considered sexist — a mathematical equation proving girls are evil, for instance — and that Kozinski thought the site was inaccessible to the public, which still doesn’t explain why he posted it. Arousal? Exhibitionism? Humor? A desire to share scat and bestiality images with his friends? Kozinski said that his son and his college-age friends may have posted some of the material, but fuck if I can figure out what’s really going on here.
What I can say is that the Romanian-born Kozinski, while conservative, is thought of as having a libertarian streak and is supposedly lauded for his “common sense” decisions. But according to Mark Kernes at AVN, Isaacs’s attorney Roger Jon Diamond isn’t even entirely sure if a mistrial has been declared, due to some weird ambiguity in Kozinski’s language, which said there was manifest necessity to declare a mistrial, not that he was actually declaring one. The only way, Diamond claims, that he knows Kozinski actually declared a mistrial is that the clerk of the court called the jurors and told them not to show up on Monday at 9:30 am to finish watching Mako’s First Time Scat and Hollywood Scat Amateurs 7, which, frankly, must have come as a big disappointment to all those retired pipefitters and schoolteachers on summer vacation. Diamond told Kernes neither he nor, as far as he knows, the prosecution was given the opportunity to object to the mistrial, which the law requires. “It’s a procedural mess,” said Diamond.
Isaacs, in the meantime, told the Times that he regretted this whole thing; he thinks Kozinski would be a fair judge for the case and he feels bad that his case caused this to come to light. The times said Isaacs planned on the trial being a “spectacle from the start” and that he saw it as one big piece of performance art — appropriate given that his defense was that his bestiality and scat images were art, and therefore protected speech.
What’s unclear to me, however, is why Kozinski needed to recuse himself. I have made light of Kozinski’s impenetrable reasoning in posting stuff that I would never in a million years disseminate, for fear of prosecution. I could also call into question whether the federal government ought to be prosecuting someone when one of its employees is posting stuff in the same general category of material (bestiality and scat).
But there’s also an issue of free speech — Isaacs’s, Kozinski’s, yours and mine. In my book, this is America. Kozinski can post whatever the fuck he wants. And if that’s true, then so can Ira Isaacs, and neither of them should have to be recused from anything.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, 17 June 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on Tuesday, 17 June 2008 at 6:56 am Brent E. Dyer wrote:
The reports by Wikipedia and the L.A. Times about what were on Judge Kozinski’s “site” are grossly misleading. Marc Randazza has done a pretty good blog entry on the subject. And Judge Kozinski’s wife (who is a lawyer) wrote an execellent letter explaining the stupidity of the whole witch hunt that was published in the Patterico’s Ponfications blog.
Despite the salacious (and ridiculous) characterizations in the L.A. Times, the materials involved are mainstays of serial e-mail forwarders. For crying out loud, the video of the man “cavorting” with a sexually aroused farm animal is from YouTube!