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Porn Found On L.A. Obscenity Case Judge's Website
Stanislav_J writes "In a bizarre revelation, the judge who is presiding over the Isaacs obscenity trial in Los Angeles was found to have sexually explicit material on a publicly-accessible website. Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, acknowledged that he had posted the materials, but says he believed the site to be for personal storage only, and not accessible to the public (though he does acknowledge sharing some of the material with friends). The files included images of masturbation, public sex, contortionist sex, a transsexual striptease, a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows, and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal. The latter two are especially ironic in that the trial involves the distribution of allegedly obscene sexual fetish videos depicting bestiality, among other things, by Ira Isaacs, an L.A. filmmaker."
Stanislav_J continues:
"The judge has blocked public access to the site (putting up a graphic that reads, 'Ain't nothin' here — y'all best be movin' on, compadre').
Isaacs' defense had welcomed the assignment of Kozinski to the case because of his long record of defending the First Amendment, but the startling news about his website (the revelation of which seems to have been interestingly timed to coincide with today's scheduled opening arguments) now have many folks calling for him to be removed from the case. There is no indication that any of the images on Kozinski's site would be considered obscene or illegal. But certainly, one has to believe that most would consider this at the very least to represent a serious conflict of interest given the nature of the trial."
Isaacs' defense had welcomed the assignment of Kozinski to the case because of his long record of defending the First Amendment, but the startling news about his website (the revelation of which seems to have been interestingly timed to coincide with today's scheduled opening arguments) now have many folks calling for him to be removed from the case. There is no indication that any of the images on Kozinski's site would be considered obscene or illegal. But certainly, one has to believe that most would consider this at the very least to represent a serious conflict of interest given the nature of the trial."
Now with animal acts.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I would certainly want judge Kozinski presiding over my case. Just as if the RIAA was on my case I would want a judge who was familiar with and used bittorrent.
Tsk, tsk. Bad submitter. How could you have posted this without the URL? I mean... we need to be able to judge the material for ourselves, right?
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
"a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows"
*blink*
*blinkblink*
*blink*
What?
If you are a judge presiding over a case involving the illegal distribution of fetish porn, you should probably take down your own web site illegally distributing fetish porn first.
I bet the reaction of the community would be much more drastic if
"his long record of defending the First Amendment" was not mentioned.
Where is the irony? I do not see it. Porn-loving judge defends "first amendment". I would call it "integrity".
The wolf was appointed to herd the sheep. Call me back when man bites dog.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Is there something wrong with enjoying your work?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
What better way to become a better judge of obscenity than to immerse yourself in relevant material. Makes sense to me in an admittedly warped way.
- Toby
Don't get too titillated now
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Uhm, I think you are forgetting the part about where he did nothing illegal.
...a judge will actually be an expert in the specialty area the case deals with.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Should a judge also recuse himself from presiding over auto theft cases if he should happen like cars?
Does liking porn predispose him to favoring the defendant in an illegal porn case? More importantly, does it do so to a greater degree than being a defender of the First Amendment?
Good luck finding a judge who can truthfully say they have never had any interest in pornography.
The pursuit of absolute tolerance leads to the most rigorous and ludicrous intolerance. - REX MURPHY
The ninth circuit is about to lose a defender of free speech because he had the savvy to run a web site but not enough to know how it really works. His collection of "porn" are things that other people sent him, the kind of crap that clogs email systems everywhere. It is impossible to have an email address and not have it sent to you. Someone you know will send it along. His mistake was putting it where it could be seen by the same kinds of fanatics that are pushing the "war on porn" in the first place. Ignore the fact that they routinely get busted like Jimmy Swaggart did. Kozinski thought people would not find it because there was no link to the directory ... ugh! He's exactly the kind of level headed person the courts need to rule fairly on these kinds of cases.
Like the fine article quotes him saying:
Those were fine sentiments when he was appointed by Ronald Reagan, but it's bad news under a regime that wants to be above the law. There you will find your animals, those who want to live by tooth and claw.
Assumptions and Conjecture don't mean he did anything wrong. A common exercise in law classes is to take a situation and state all the laws that could have been broken.
IE: A guy is walking down a street.
Well really the example doesn't lend itself to any laws being broken but here are the responses you'd get anyways.
1 - Maybe he is walking IN the street in which case he is Jaywalking
2 - He also might be obstructing traffic
3 - If he isn't wearing any clothes then he might be arrested for public indecency
I could go on but I won't.
I fail to see where the conflict of interest is here. So he likes porn. Yeah, he's MALE.
What would be the 'right' judge to preside over this case? A known prude who prays to God at least seven times a week and has publically stated that pornography is a sin?
So he has a life outside the court room. Big fucking deal. There's no money involved in it for him, I'm sure, and he probably doesn't know the defendant either. Where is the conflict of interest?!
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The mind of a censor is best described in the following joke/anecdote.
Every day, Joe, a construction worker, would walk to his job singing dirty songs. Mrs. Williams finally got fed up and complained to the police about Joe's singing. They told Joe to cut out the singing. The next day, Mrs. Williams complained again. They asked Joe, and he had stopped singing. So they asked her what the problem was. "He's whistling dirty songs now."
Cynical Idealist
The bad news: the site is down. "Safari can't open the page 'http://alex.kozinski.com/' because it could not connect to the server 'alex.kozinski.com'"
The good news: it's in the Wayback machine.
The bad news: the Wayback machine just shows "Ain't nothin' here. Y'all best be movin' on, compadre" on the main page, from 2004 through the last snapshot in 2005. (The news story saying that this is a recent change is apparently wrong).
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I bet 100% of the material on the website is the same material that moves around the "have you seen this" emails forwarded on by every unknowing idiot new to the Internet. I recognize the description of the animal video as the one where the drunk guy is trying to get away from the donkey that is trying to mount him. I also know the woman wearing the cow body paint circulated in a similar email. The vague descriptions on the others also sound as if they are the same type of material that gets forwarded around. I wouldn't be surprised if every adult who has ever used the Internet has seen the material in question, that the judge has some online storage with the material in question isn't surprising to me, and certainly not a reason to dismiss him from the case.
At the bare minimum I would suggest the material in question makes him much more applicable to judge a case involving bestiality because he should be able to recognize the difference between protected speech and images (those emails classify as such) and obscene material.
...the Aristocrats
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
Perhaps the porn was there as a benchmark (no pun intended). Anything freakier than what the judge had is obscene, anything less exotic is simply porn. Even if that wasn't it's intended purpose, it would make an interesting point to argue. After all as a judge, Kozinski is a moral compass, and he is sharing this material with his friends whom we can also assume are pillars of the community, so by them accepting this material,we can conclude that it is not "Offensive to accepted standards of decency or modesty." because the standard-bearers of our society have already show to find it acceptable.
We are all just people.
The case itself would provide a precedence for the judge's own defense in his ensuing criminal public obscenity trial.
Where does the article even imply the judge is going to be criminally prosecuted for the content that was on his website? From the description, the content on his site may be seen as embarrassing and in poor taste, but you have to do far more than post nudie pictures your site to be brought up on obscenity charges.
By your logic, a judge who drinks and enjoys alcoholic beverages must recuse himself from a DUI trial because of conflict of interest.
Probably.
Doesn't sound like it. Not that it matters. Not even commercial* porn providers require age verification.
The only major problem with that is, you'd have to actually show (a) the actual minors whose delinquency was contributed to (the "making available" argument doesn't fly) and (b) almost certainly show there was good reason to believe that the judge new he was distributing said content to minors (otherwise most porn mags would be shut down, since obviously if the porn mags weren't printed, you couldn't find minors with them).
In short, you have to consider the judge's position as if he were any other major publisher. Given the repeated attempts to try to "protect" minors on the internet in the past involving porn and how few laws have stood up to Constitutional scrutiny (the only one that comes to mind as accepted is ones involving libraries accpeting federal funds in exchange for having to include anti-porn filters; and assumedly that has to do with it being voluntary to accept funds), it just doesn't seem likely that yet another contorted attempt would work. But, obviously, it's all a matter of taking the judge to court and spending several years until the Supreme Court decides.
*Commercial in this context doesn't just mean "and we want your credit card number". The second one starts receiving money as a result of ads on one's website, one can be called commercial (just like broadcast TV). Assumedly this was a major reason that the age verification laws were discarded, as it would be very unreasonable to have every last website showing a nipple with an ad on it to request a credit card number. And odds are, most people *wouldn't* give a credit card number to the site. The last part, then, severely cripples freedom of speech by abridging the legitimate right of the vast majority to access a site without undue burden. Now, if there were some way to age verify someone in a more trivial fashion on the internet, the courts would probably have a much different interpretation on things.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
"Everyone that has pr0n less nasty than mine is a prude. Everyone that has nastier pr0n than me is a freak." - Based on that driving quote.
For every case the Supreme Court hears, how many do they allow to stand?-- http://mediamatters.org/items/200511090012
If 16 of 19 cases that were taken were overturned in 04/05, how many cases did the Supreme Court decline to hear, allowing the 9th Circuit decision to stand? I can't find statistics on the numbers of appeals where the Supreme Court essentially "agreed" with the Circuit court, but I did find this neat doohickey that lets me generate reports on case information for each Circuit, and it tells me that for 2005, the number of "on the merits" decisions (as opposed to decisions about procedural error, etc) was:
1st) 986
2nd) 2121
3rd) 2329
4th) 2590
5th) 3608
6th) 2903
7th) 1480
8th) 2078
9th) 6197
10th) 1524
11th) 3579
DCth
If every one of those 6197 decisions was appealed and the Supreme Court only disagreed 16 times, that's a pretty damn good percentage in my opinion.
Finally, California has money out the wazoo. That money is required in order to appeal cases in the first place, and doubly so to appeal to the Supreme Court. Coupled with the fact that the government is more or less required to let the people try to appeal (something about a right to petition for redress of grievances), you can see those dollars at work in this Circuit.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Of course not. Only if the judge's website had illegal porn should he be considered to have a conflict of interest.
That's a really retarded and overused argument. Are you saying that the decisions by the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit are examples of that bullshit known called "judicial activism"? According to the 2000 census, the states within its jurisdiction comprise 20% of the country's population. And they also see a fifth of the federal appellate workload. Therefore, the Ninth Circuit probably has the most cases upheld by the Supreme Court.
... naive. What do you know?
Your lawyer buddies probably also know that Judge Kozinski tends to be conservative/libertarian, not "liberal" (as the court is often characterized), and is a highly respect jurist. I'm not defending him or his actions, but I'm saying that dismissing an entire court due to some stupid belief is just
Cryptome posted a Yahoo cache of Kozinski's directory on its site.
Some of the more interesting file names include:
a.day.without.jews.wmv
BBCCopsUndies.wmv
Colo-rectalSurgeon.wav
isitmanisitwoman.pps
jewsdontcamp.mp3
piss_diver.wmv
Sheep_guy.jpg
show.them.to.me.wmv
testicle.interview.wmv
Looks like Jewish groups may not appreciate his sense of humor as well as the anti-porn crowd. At any rate, I don't see much of anything there that looks from the file names alone to be hardcore. It really does look like a directory of miscellaneous stuff that came in "Look at this!" and "Check THIS out!" e-mails from friends that he just stored on the site for easy access.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
You laugh, but this actually happened. Frank Zappa's completely instrumental album Jazz From Hell was marked with one of the first "Parental Advisory - Explicit Lyrics" warnings. I repeat: the album has no lyrics. But it had an explicit lyrics warning from the RIAA. The likely reason? His vocal opposition to the Tipper Gore-led Parent's Music Resource Center, whose bludgeoning pressured the RIAA to start putting those warnings on albums in the first place. See http://ericnuzum.com/banned/incidents/80s.html, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parents_Music_Resource_Center, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_From_Hell