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Justice officials fall short in targeting porn, conservatives say

http://www.jewishworldreview.com | (KRT) For the first time in a decade, the Justice Department has begun going after producers of pornographic material - conducting investigations, launching raids, filing obscenity charges and hauling defendants into court.

Previous anti-pornography campaigns, such as a much-publicized crusade by then-Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese in 1986, were criticized by liberals as misguided and puritanical. But this time it is conservative and religious groups that are complaining, saying the department is making a halfhearted effort and focusing only on the most hard-core material.

The Clinton administration largely steered clear of obscenity cases, and the Justice Department acknowledges that it has not undertaken a major obscenity prosecution in about a decade. The department has focused most of its efforts in this area on stopping child pornography, particularly on the Internet.

But Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft announced when he took office in 2001 that the Justice Department would make obscenity prosecutions a priority, and the first fruits of that effort are beginning to appear.

Earlier this month, Mary Beth Buchanan, the chief federal prosecutor in Pittsburgh, filed a 10-count criminal charge against two owners of Extreme Associates, an adult-video operation based in Los Angeles that bills itself as "The Hardest Hard Core on the Web."

The indictment charges owners Robert Zicari and Janet Romano of using the mail and the Internet to distribute obscene material. The charges carry a maximum punishment of a $2.5 million fine and 50 years in prison.

Buchanan said the indictment is the first major case in Ashcroft's tenure to target a national distributor of pornographic material.

"This is not the first case we've pursued, but it is the most significant," Buchanan said.

Louis Sirkin, the lawyer representing Extreme Associates, said that his clients plan to plead not guilty and that pornography is largely a subjective matter.

Obscenity "is generally based on the eyes of the beholder," Sirkin said. "In a free society, each of us should be able to make our own determinations."

Despite the Extreme Associates indictment, many anti-obscenity activists are skeptical of the administration's efforts.

"The Justice Department has had a strategy of going after only the most extreme material distributed by small operators," said Patrick Trueman, a former head of the Justice Department's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section who now consults with anti-obscenity groups.

Trueman pointed out that the Extreme Associates videos cited in the indictment are extraordinarily violent, depicting women being beaten, stabbed, suffocated and raped. It is material not likely to be sold in most adult video stores, he said.

"They are not going after the pornography industry; they are trying to pick off little targets that are easy," Trueman said.

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Jan LaRue, chief counsel for Concerned Women for America, said she applauds the Justice Department for pursuing Extreme Associates. "It's one of the smaller ones, and they make the most deviant material."

LaRue said there are "100,000 Web sites offering material that is prosecutable," but the Justice Department is not going after those sites and has set the bar for prosecution "too high to have any meaningful impact."

Justice Department officials dispute that and say the cases they have pursued so far are just the beginning.

Andrew Oosterbaan, chief of the department's obscenity unit, wrote to conservative critics on Aug. 7 that investigators are pursuing at least 49 inquiries involving potential obscenity violations.

"Several investigations are well under way against large-scale, nationwide distribution enterprises," Oosterbaan wrote. "Most of the investigations target producers and distributors offering material of egregious content as well as more `mainstream' content."

He added, "Far from failing, the department already has made significant progress in combating obscenity, and is well-positioned to make substantially more progress."

In an interview, Oosterbaan said he hoped the pro-family groups would ultimately be pleased. "We're going to make a difference," he said.

Oosterbaan added that the Internet has made pornography a greater concern because it is so much easier for children to access the material.

He said that if asked, most Americans would say: "I don't like what is invading my home. I don't like the fact that my kids see this. This is bad."

LaRue acknowledged that the department has made progress prosecuting child pornography but said that is because those cases are easier to prove. Child pornography cases turn on objective facts, such as whether the subject was younger than 18 and involved in a lascivious act.

General obscenity cases are more difficult.

The Supreme Court has ruled that to overcome a presumption that sexually oriented material is protected under the 1st Amendment, prosecutors must prove that an average person applying "contemporary community standards" would find it "patently offensive" and without literary or artistic merit.

Even under that subjective standard, "we can prohibit all hard-core pornography" if the Justice Department is willing to pursue it, said Robert Peters, president of New York-based Morality in Media.

Peters said he is aware of the dangers of obscene material because he once was addicted to pornography.

He said, "It took me a year to stop smoking, but it took me six years to stop going up to 42nd Street," once New York City's primary district for adult bookstores and theaters.

Oosterbaan's memo said that by focusing first on the most extreme material, the department can build a record of successful prosecutions, emboldening prosecutors and setting precedent for additional cases.

Besides, he said, "It would be an odd, and ineffective, law-enforcement strategy to ignore the worst offenders."

To civil libertarians, the current initiative is a misguided waste of money.

Paul Cambria, a lawyer who has defended companies that produce adult material, said: "Go fight terrorists. Fight the international drug trade. Don't be spending our money going to chase down people who make movies."

Regarding "mainstream" adult entertainment, Cambria said, the Justice Department and conservative groups may believe it is "patently offensive," but "the majority of the population disagrees with them, which is indicated by the billions of dollars spent every year on this material."

The Supreme Court's emphasis on community standards indicates that obscenity should be an issue for local communities, not the federal government, to decide, Cambria said.

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