Porn block on new PCs to ‘fight trafficking’ – unless you pay $20

12-22-2016 South Carolina:

Proposing a bill that requires computers sold in a state to block access to online porn on the grounds that it “would be another way to fight human trafficking” is an interesting approach to crime prevention. That’s what Bill Chumley, Republican state representative, is suggesting in South Carolina.

But if you’re an adult who might want to enjoy legal adult entertainment in the privacy of your own home, you can, under the provisions of the bill, pay a $20 fee to remove that lock.

Outwardly, Chumley’s Human Trafficking Prevention Act resembles morally intentioned ransomware that would be a pain in the neck to administer but easy to bypass.

If the bill became law, every computer sold in the state capable of accessing the internet (ie all new computers) would by default have to “install and operate a digital blocking capability that renders obscenity inaccessible”. It’s not clear how software blocking would filter pornography from other content, although large social media sites would be exempt.

Buyers over the age of 18, sellers and manufacturers could have the blocking deactivated for a one-off fee.

Chumley explained the scheme: “If we could have manufacturers install filters that would be shipped to South Carolina, then anything that children have access on for pornography would be blocked. We felt like that would be another way to fight human trafficking.”

It seems unkind to point out the bill’s flaws, although they are numerous. ..Continued.. by John E Dunn

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SEC porn investigation nets dozens

In today's sex crazed society, is porn likened to a cup of coffee? Worse yet, some of these are the moral police who make laws telling former sex offenders right from wrong!

4-23-2010 Washington DC:

Dozens of Securities and Exchange Commission staffers used government computers to access and download explicit images and many of the incidents have occurred since the global financial meltdown began, according to a new watchdog investigation.

The SEC inspector general conducted 33 probes of employees, 31 of which occurred in the last two and a half years, according to a summary of the cases requested by Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) that first surfaced Thursday evening.

Several of employees held senior positions, earning between $99,300 and $222,418 per year, the inspector general's summary said. Three of the incidents occurred this year, ten in 2009, 16 in 2008, two in 2007 and one each in 2006 and 2005.

In one instance, a regional office staff account admitted viewing pornography on his office computer and on his SEC-issued laptop while on official government travel. Another staff account received nearly 1,800 access denials for pornography Web sites in a two-week period and had more than 600 images saved on her laptop’s hard drive, the report said.

A senior attorney at SEC headquarters in Washington admitted he sometimes spent as much as eight hours viewing pornography from his office computer, according to the report. The attorney’s computer ran out of space for the downloaded images, so he started storing them on CDs and DVDs that he stored in his office.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said it was “nothing short of disturbing that high-ranking officials within the SEC were spending more time looking at pornography than taking action to help stave off the events that brought our nation's economy to the brink of collapse."

"This stunning report should make everyone question the wisdom of moving forward with plans to give regulators like the SEC even more widespread authority," Issa said in a subtle jab at ongoing financial reform efforts.

Grassley’s decision to release the summary comes as SEC investigators have filed a fraud case against Wall Street powerhouse Goldman Sachs. But a spokeswoman cautioned against reading too much into the timing.

"The IG findings that Grassley released underscore the importance of good IG work," said Grassley spokeswoman Jill Kozeny.

The behavior exposed in the watchdog report violates government ethics rules, but illegal pornography access by federal workers is nothing new:

• A senior executive at the National Science Foundation spent at least 331 days looking at pornography on his government computer and chatting online with nude or partially clad women without being detected. The problems reportedly were so pervasive they diverted the agency's watchdog from its main mission.

• National Park Service employee John A. Latschar, who oversaw the Gettysburg National Military Park, used his office computer over a two-year period to search for and view more than 3,400 sexually explicit images. He was later reassigned to an unspecified desk job.

• Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, established a Web site that featured sexually explicit photos and video. He later acknowledged posting images, defended the content as "funny" (no, really) and said he thought the site was for his private storage. All of this while he was presiding over an obscenity trial. He later took the site down.

If you know of any other examples -- or are just generally outraged -- leave your thoughts in the comments section below. ..Source..

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Porn: Good for us?

3-5-2010 National:

Scientific examination of the subject has found that as the use of porn increases, the rate of sex crimes goes down.

Pornography. Most people have seen it, and have a strong opinion about it. Many of those opinions are negative—some people argue that ready access to pornography disrupts social order, encouraging people to commit rape, sexual assault, and other sex-related crimes. And even if pornography doesn’t trigger a crime, they say, it contributes to the degradation of women. It harms the women who are depicted by pornography, and harms those who do not participate but are encouraged to perform the acts depicted in it by men who are acculturated by it. Many even adamantly believe that pornography should become illegal.

Alternatively, others argue that pornography is an expression of fantasies that can actually inhibit sexual activity, and act as a positive displacement for sexual aggression. Pornography offers a readily available means of satisfying sexual arousal (masturbation), they say, which serves as a substitute for dangerous, harmful, and illegal activities.

Some feminists even claim that pornography can empower women by loosening them from the shackles of social prudery and restrictions.

But what do the data say? Over the years, many scientists have investigated the link between pornography (considered legal under the First Amendment in the United States unless judged “obscene”) and sex crimes and attitudes towards women. And in every region investigated, researchers have found that as pornography has increased in availability, sex crimes have either decreased or not increased.

It’s not hard to find a study population, given how widespread pornography has become. The United States alone produces 10,000 pornographic movies each year. The Free Speech Coalition, a porn industry–lobbying group, estimates that adult video/DVD sales and rentals amount to at least $4 billion per year. The Internet is a rich source, with 40 million adults regularly visiting porn Web sites, and more than one-quarter of regular users downloading porn at work. And it’s not just men who are interested: Nelsen/Net reports that 9.4 million women in the United States accessed online pornography Web sites in the month of September 2003. According to the conservative media watchdog group Family Safe Media, the porn industry makes more money than the top technology companies combined, including Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Amazon.

To examine the effect this widespread use of porn may be having on society, researchers have often exposed people to porn and measured some variable such as changes in attitude or predicted hypothetical behaviors, interviewed sex offenders about their experience with pornography, and interviewed victims of sex abuse to evaluate if pornography was involved in the assault. Surprisingly few studies have linked the availability of porn in any society with antisocial behaviors or sex crimes. Among those studies none have found a causal relationship and very few have even found one positive correlation.

Despite the widespread and increasing availability of sexually explicit materials, according to national FBI Department of Justice statistics, the incidence of rape declined markedly from 1975 to 1995. This was particularly seen in the age categories 20–24 and 25–34, the people most likely to use the Internet. The best known of these national studies are those of Berl Kutchinsky, who studied Denmark, Sweden, West Germany, and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. He showed that for the years from approximately 1964 to 1984, as the amount of pornography increasingly became available, the rate of rapes in these countries either decreased or remained relatively level. Later research has shown parallel findings in every other country examined, including Japan, Croatia, China, Poland, Finland, and the Czech Republic. In the United States there has been a consistent decline in rape over the last 2 decades, and in those countries that allowed for the possession of child pornography, child sex abuse has declined. Significantly, no community in the United States has ever voted to ban adult access to sexually explicit material. The only feature of a community standard that holds is an intolerance for materials in which minors are involved as participants or consumers.

In terms of the use of pornography by sex offenders, the police sometimes suggest that a high percentage of sex offenders are found to have used pornography. This is meaningless, since most men have at some time used pornography. Looking closer, Michael Goldstein and Harold Kant found that rapists were more likely than nonrapists in the prison population to have been punished for looking at pornography while a youngster, while other research has shown that incarcerated nonrapists had seen more pornography, and seen it at an earlier age, than rapists. What does correlate highly with sex offense is a strict, repressive religious upbringing. Richard Green too has reported that both rapists and child molesters use less pornography than a control group of “normal” males.

Now let’s look at attitudes towards women. Studies of men who had seen X-rated movies found that they were significantly more tolerant and accepting of women than those men who didn’t see those movies, and studies by other investigators—female as well as male—essentially found similarly that there was no detectable relationship between the amount of exposure to pornography and any measure of misogynist attitudes. No researcher or critic has found the opposite, that exposure to pornography—by any definition—has had a cause-and-effect relationship towards ill feelings or actions against women. No correlation has even been found between exposure to porn and calloused attitudes toward women.

There is no doubt that some people have claimed to suffer adverse effects from exposure to pornography—just look at testimony from women’s shelters, divorce courts and other venues. But there is no evidence it was the cause of the claimed abuse or harm.

Ultimately, there is no freedom that can’t be and isn’t misused. This can range from the freedom to bear arms to the freedom to bear children (just look at “Octomom”). But it doesn’t mean that the freedom of the majority should be restricted to prevent the abuses of the few. When people transgress into illegal behavior, there are laws to punish them, and those act as a deterrent. In the United States, where one out of every 138 residents is incarcerated, just imagine if pornography were illegal—there’d be more people in prison than out. ..Source.. apted from “Pornography, Public Acceptance and Sex Related Crime: A Review,” Int J Law Psychiatry, 32:304–14, 2009.

Milton Diamond is a professor in the department of anatomy, biochemistry and physiology at the University of Hawaii and director of the Pacific Center for Sex and Society.

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Man trying to get name off sex offender list

2-18-2010 Michigan:

A former Monroe restaurant owner who served time in jail for showing pornographic videos to teenaged employees is trying to have his name removed from the sex offender registry list.

The Michigan Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that a Monroe County judge should re-address the registry issue involving Jeffrey M. Fraunhoffer, 58, who was convicted in 2008 of disseminating sexually explicit matter to a minor and was sentenced to serve eight months in jail.

While Mr. Fraunhoffer's attorney appealed the convictions and sentence, the appellate court only allowed the sex offender registry argument to be heard before Circuit Judge Michael W. LaBeau.

"We appreciate the opportunity to raise that issue," said defense attorney Gail Rodwan of Detroit. "(Mr. Fraunhoffer) would not like to be on the sex offender registry."

Monroe County Assistant Prosecutor Michael C. Brown said based on the testimony and convictions, he believes Mr. Fraunhoffer should remain on the list and continue to register his name by law.

"The facts of the case are he was showing porn to minors," Mr. Brown said. "I think the evidence supports that he would have to register."

Mr. Fraunhoffer used to own the former Jefana's restaurant on E. Front St. in downtown Monroe. Several employees testified during trial that he was watching sexually explicit videos on a television inside the restaurant.

One employee at the time, a 18-year-old girl, said in court during trial that she and another female worker clearly saw the pornographic shows played on the TV and told Mr. Fraunhoffer that it was "gross" and he should turn it off.

"The defendant just kind of laughed it off and told them not to tell anybody, especially his wife, or they would be fired," the appellate court judges stated in their eight-page ruling. "They saw and heard videos of sexual intercourse, sex toys and throwing pies."

Mr. Fraunhoffer also was convicted of three counts of allowing the consumption of alcoholic liquor in an unlicensed establishment.

At his sentencing in June, 2008, Judge LaBeau ordered Mr. Fraunhoffer — in addition to jail time — to register as a sex offender for his convictions. The defense argued to the appellate court that since the violations involved showing videos, Mr. Fraunhoffer should not fall under the guidelines of all sexual offenses.

The issue is expected to be argued in court in the next several weeks, and Judge LaBeau will make the final decision. ..Source.. Ray Kisonas

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Boys who watch porn 'think sexual harassment is acceptable'

1-26-2010 United Kingdom:

Boys who look at porn grow up to be men who think sexual harassment is acceptable, a new study has found.

Research into pornography in a dozen countries found that boys who are exposed to pornography found it more difficult to form successful relationships when older, while they were more likely to have casual sexual intercourse.

Previous research has found that six in 10 boys in Britain under 16 have watched pornography, either accidentally or deliberately. The average amount of time they watch porn on the internet is 90 minutes a week.

Michael Flood, who carried out the study at the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, said: "There is compelling evidence from around the world that pornography has negative effects on individuals and communities.

"Porn is a very poor sex educator because it shows sex in unrealistic ways and fails to address intimacy, love, connection or romance. Often it is quite callous and hostile in its depictions of women.

"It doesn't mean that every young person is going out to rape somebody, but it does increase the likelihood that will happen."

John Carr, secretary of the Children's Charities' Coalition on Internet Safety (CHIS), told The Sunday Times: "We had a case in west London where a boy in the first year of primary school was bringing pictures to school and was acting them out in the playground during the break. When they did a home visit the dad was downloading it and it was all over the house.

"It is not an argument for banning it but it is an argument to find better ways to make it harder for kids to get hold of it."

Petra Boynton, a psychologist, added: “Children are not necessarily looking at porn for gratification. They are doing so because they are bored and not supervised. Often when children look at more extreme porn it is done for bravado so they can laugh and say how disgusting it is.”

Last months scientists at the University of Montreal set out to research the effects of pornography only to abandon their study because they were unable to find any 20-year-old men who had not been exposed to it. They did however find that young boys first watched pornography when they were just 10. ..Source..

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Porn prosecution fuels debate

8-2-2009 National:

President Barack Obama’s Justice Department has quietly agreed to move a pornography prosecution out of socially conservative Montana to more urbane New Jersey – fueling perceptions by some attorneys that the new administration is stepping back from the aggressive approach the Bush administration took to prosecuting obscenity.

“This is a substantial change of position,” said Louis Sirkin, an attorney who has represented many in the pornography industry, including Hustler publisher Larry Flynt. “The new administration has come in there and made a new determination….It certainly is different than what we have seen in the past.”

“I think it has a lot to do with the change in administration,” said a former federal prosecutor, Laurie Levenson of Loyola Law School. “It makes you wonder how far they were pushing the envelope before…..These cases are fraught with problems and are not a high priority.”

The Justice Department issued a press release Friday evening announcing that Barry Goldman, 58, of Jersey City was indicted by a New Jersey federal grand jury for shipping what prosecutors said were obscene DVDs to Virginia and Montana. Goldman allegedly operated a web-based business called the “Torture Portal.”

The press release didn’t mention that Goldman was indicted by a federal grand jury in Montana last August for some of the same shipments, which he unwittingly made to the FBI. Nor was it mentioned that Justice Department prosecutors challenged a federal judge’s ruling transferring the case to New Jersey—before abruptly dropping the fight in May and agreeing to the transfer.

Since a 1973 Supreme Court decision required juries to assess “contemporary community standards” in obscenity cases, the venue for such prosecutions has become a pivotal issue. Critics of Republican administrations have accused them of deliberately bringing such cases in conservative places like Tennessee, Mississippi and Oklahoma.

Venue “is everything in obscenity cases. It’s the whole ball of wax,” said Larry Walters, an adult-industry defense lawyer.

Social conservatives railed against the Clinton Administration for not prosecuting adult obscenity and were disappointed when few such cases were brought in the early years of the Bush Administration. Things perked up a bit in 2005 when Attorney General Alberto Gonzales set up an Obscenity Prosecution Task Force, which ultimately focused on prosecuting fetish, bestiality and so-called fringe porn.

Six months into the Obama Administration, the task force is still in business and is still headed by a former U.S. Attorney for Utah under President Ronald Reagan, Brent Ward.

“Ward is still around. This has been somewhat surprising to a lot of us,” Sirkin said.

Since Obama’s inauguration, prosecutors have pressed on with pending obscenity cases and accepted guilty pleas in one high-profile prosecution brought in Pittsburgh. However, there have been no announcements of new adult obscenity indictments, a trend that Justice Department officials declined to discuss, though they did note that federal prosecutions for child pornography have continued apace.

Earlier this year, Goldman’s public defender, David Merchant, asked Billings, Montana-based Judge Richard Cebull to transfer the case to New Jersey because there was no apparent connection to Montana aside from undercover FBI agents asking Goldman to send the DVDs there. “There is no doubt that this case…is the epitome of venue shopping,” Merchant wrote.

In March, Cebull, an appointee of President George H.W. Bush, agreed to ship the case out to New Jersey. He noted that an undercover FBI agent from Virginia first met Goldman at an adult entertainment convention in Las Vegas in 2006. “This court is concerned with taking up Montana court time with out-of-state defendants who could potentially be prosecuted elsewhere,” the judge wrote.

Prosecutors quickly moved for a stay of Cebull’s order and then filed a rare mid-case appeal with the 9th Circuit, asking the court to expedite its consideration of the issue. After the judges agreed to hear arguments in early June, the Justice Department abruptly reversed course, saying that the indictment should never have been sought in Montana in the first place.



“The government has re-examined its charging decision,” prosecutors wrote on May 22. “After further internal deliberation and consultation, the government has now determined that initiation of this particular prosecution in the district of receipt, although legally appropriate, is not consistent with an internal Department of Justice policy,” the government said.

Prosecutors said that policy, dating to 1979 or earlier and included in the U.S. Attorney’s Manual, says postal obscenity cases “should not ordinarily” be filed in the district where an undercover agent had materials sent unless the defendant had some other contacts with that district.

A Justice Department spokeswoman, Tracy Schmaler, declined to discuss the internal deliberations that led to the government’s change in position. The department determined “that the most appropriate venue in which to charge the case is New Jersey, where the defendant resides and from where the material was allegedly mailed,” Schmaler said in an e-mail.

Asked about the Justice Department’s official explanation for its change of heart, Merchant told POLITICO: “I’m afraid my government is not telling the truth in this case.”

However, the defense attorney said he doubted the move had to do with Obama appointees. “I’m still waiting for the audacity of hope to appear…It has nothing to do with this administration,” Merchant said. “Nobody can figure out why they took their ball and went home, except for the idea that they were going to make bad law” if they lost the appeal.

“I’m actually surprised to hear they re-indicted the case,” Merchant said. “In New Jersey, everybody’s going to shrug their shoulders and say, ‘Who cares?’”

A conservative anti-pornography crusader, Janice Crouse of the Concerned Women for America, said she was troubled by the move. “New Jersey is far more lenient on these kinds of matters than Montana,” Crouse said. “So this represents a softening of the DOJ. Pornographers….are now finding circumstances where they can get a better deal than they have in the past.”

But Patrick Trueman, a former obscenity prosecutor pressing the new administration to do more to battle pornography, said critics were jumping the gun by blaming the Obama team for moving the Goldman case.

“I don’t think it’s any indication the Obama Administration is taking a dive,” he said, while adding, “If I was in the department, I’d be arguing against doing this.”

Obscenity cases are politically sensitive for the Obama Justice Department because the deputy attorney general, David Ogden, was criticized by Republicans during his confirmation for his past legal work for Playboy and other purveyors of sexually explicit material.

Analysts see other political factors at play as well. The U.S. Attorney who brought the first Goldman case last year, William Mercer, had close ties to the Bush administration and in an unusual arrangement served as the No. 3 official at the Justice Department. In addition, complaints from Ward about alleged resistance to bringing obscenity cases reportedly played a role in the firings of at least two of the U.S. Attorneys whose dismissals by Bush in 2006 sparked controversy and investigations.

Adding a new political dimension to the saga, the case filed against Goldman last week was assigned to Judge Joseph Greenaway Jr. of Newark, a Clinton appointee. In June, Obama nominated Greenaway to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit. The Senate has not yet acted on the nomination. ..Source.. by JOSH GERSTEIN

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Porn in the USA: Conservatives are biggest consumers

3-2-2009 National:

Americans may paint themselves in increasingly bright shades of red and blue, but new research finds one thing that varies little across the nation: the liking for online pornography.

A new nationwide study (pdf) of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment provider finds little variation in consumption between states.

"When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different," says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School.

However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.

"Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by," Edelman says.

Political divide

Edelman spends part of his time helping companies such as Microsoft and AOL detect advertising fraud. Another consulting client runs dozens of adult websites, though he says he is not at liberty to identify the firm.

That company did, however, provide Edelman with roughly two years of credit card data from 2006 to 2008 that included a purchase date and each customer's postal code.

After controlling for differences in broadband internet access between states – online porn tends to be a bandwidth hog – and adjusting for population, he found a relatively small difference between states with the most adult purchases and those with the fewest.

The biggest consumer, Utah, averaged 5.47 adult content subscriptions per 1000 home broadband users; Montana bought the least with 1.92 per 1000. "The differences here are not so stark," Edelman says.

Number 10 on the list was West Virginia at 2.94 subscriptions per 1000, while number 41, Michigan, averaged 2.32.

Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year's presidential election – Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favoured Barack Obama.

Old-fashioned values

Church-goers bought less online porn on Sundays – a 1% increase in a postal code's religious attendance was associated with a 0.1% drop in subscriptions that day. However, expenditures on other days of the week brought them in line with the rest of the country, Edelman finds.

Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don't explicitly restrict gay marriage.

To get a better handle on other associations between social attitudes and pornography consumption, Edelman melded his data with a previous study on public attitudes toward religion.
States where a majority of residents agreed with the statement "I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage," bought 3.6 more subscriptions per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference emerged for the statement "AIDS might be God's punishment for immoral sexual behaviour."

"One natural hypothesis is something like repression: if you're told you can't have this, then you want it more," Edelman says.

Journal reference: Journal of Economic Perspectives vol 23, p 209 (pdf) ..News Source.. by Ewen Callaway

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UK- Porn bill for couple who can't download

11-30-2008 United Kingdom:

Innocent people are getting letters from lawyers claiming they should pay for films they've never seen.

A Hertfordshire couple in their 60s were horrified to receive a letter last week from a London firm of lawyers accusing them of dowloading a hardcore gay porn movie. It demanded they pay £503 for "copyright infringement" or face a high court action. The 20-page "pre-settlement letter" from lawyers Davenport Lyons, acting on behalf of German pornogaphers, insisted they pay £503 to their clients for the 115 minute film Army Fuckers which features "Gestapo" officers and "Czech" farmers.

The bewildered couple contacted Guardian Money. "We were offended by the title of the film. We don't do porn - straight or gay - and we can't do downloads. We have to ask our son even to do an iTunes purchase."

But this Hertfordshire couple are not alone. A large number of people have received this letter, provoking a massive outcry on web forums such as slyck.com and torrentfreak which estimate 25,000 of these letters have been sent out. If all the recipients paid up, it would net £12.5m - more than almost any porn film has made.

The lawyers also sent out similar demands for a second German gay porn film with an even more offensive title.

Media expert Michael Coyle at Southampton-based solicitors Lawdit, is fighting on behalf of individuals who have received the letter from Davenport Lyons. "Owners of films, music and computer games obviously have to protect their rights and prevent illegal copying, otherwise everyone would get all sorts of content for free.

"But many of these letters have been sent to people who have no idea what a download is. We've had straight pensioners complain, and a mother who had the shock of having to question her 14-year-old son about gay porn because he was the only apparent user of the internet connection that was registered to her."

Coyle says Davenport Lyons represent DigiProtect, a German company with rights to both pornographic films.

He questions the amount demanded and methods used to identify computers alleged to have downloaded material. He believes the sum demanded is out of all proportion to the alleged injury. "In one case, Davenport Lyons wanted £500 for a £20 game. The alleged file-sharing would have cost only about £50 - the rest is legal costs."

"All they do is find the internet connection, demand the service provider reveal the name and address (not all do) and then send out a letter demanding cash. But the technology is flawed. It is easy to hijack a wireless router especially in a built-up area or a block of flats, so it is never clear who used what," says Coyle.

Coyle offers a £50 service for those who refuse to cave in to the demands as he believes some of the firm's successes are due to consumers paying up because they cannot afford the legal costs of defending themselves.

"They have won court cases including a high-profile £16,000 on a games download. But these have not been defended. My advice is to deny file sharing to any such request," he adds.

We put a number of questions to Davenport Lyons. In a statement it said: "We cannot comment on individual cases. We represent clients who own valuable rights in copyright material and are legally entitled to protect and enforce such rights against any unlawful infringement. The material was not put on a file-sharing site by our clients.

"We write an initial letter to those suspected of illegal file sharing based on technical information received from our clients. Such procedure is required by court rules. We allow ample opportunity for the recipient to respond, and if they have done nothing wrong they have no reason to be concerned." ..News Source.. by Tony Levene

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FL- State Court Bungles Porn Ruling

7-14-2008 Florida:

For years Floridians have benefited from a state Supreme Court that has been level-headed, fair and well-reasoned, with rulings right on the mark far more often than not. The court truly is one of the best in the nation.

But Thursday's decision allowing sexual deviants to possess pornography can best be summed up with one word: absurd.

The ruling was in the case of a Miami man who pleaded guilty to three counts of lewd or lascivious battery and exhibition on a teenage boy, a perverted crime. After a short stint in prison, he was released to continue finishing his sentence, which also included house arrest. He was charged with violating it when authorities found pornography in his home.

The disputed state law goes like this: "Unless otherwise indicated in the treatment plan provided by the sexual offender treatment program, a prohibition on viewing, owning, or possessing any obscene, pornographic, or sexually stimulating visual or auditory material, including telephone, electronic media, computer programs, or computer services that are relevant to the offender's deviant behavior pattern."

The law should be clear to anyone who can read the English language: Absolutely no form of pornography is allowed. But the 5-2 majority, led by Justice Raoul Cantero III, got bogged down with commas, modifiers and antecedents in a 24-page opinion that amounted to a silly grammar lesson and said the law is ambiguous.

The result is that the court decided sex offenders can have access to porn as long as it doesn't relate to a defendant's particular "deviant behavior pattern," agreeing with one lower court's interpretation and rejecting another's. How ridiculous.

This is a textbook example of the majority missing the forest for the trees. Sex offenders should not be allowed to have, view or watch any pornography while serving their sentences, period. Allowing them to view some types is like telling alcoholics they can drink beer or wine but not hard liquor. It's still dangerous.

Justices R. Fred Lewis and Kenneth Bell were right to dissent; they fully understand that the law intends to prohibit all pornographic materials.

The majority obviously didn't put enough emphasis on the type of porn found in the Miami offender's home, either: It was of young males having sex - the same type of behavior for which he was arrested. It couldn't be determined whether the people in the images were underage, according to The Miami Herald, but it shouldn't matter.

Perhaps state lawmakers got a little bit too wordy themselves and also went overboard with their use of commas in crafting the 1995 law and later expanding it. But the intent is obvious.

Based on the court's ruling, lawmakers need to amend the law to remove any doubt, perhaps by simply saying "all sexually oriented material is prohibited." Either way, this matter needs to be resolved as soon as possible. ..News Source.. by The Tampa Tribune

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FL- Florida high court: Sex offenders can have porn

7-11-2008 Florida:

The Florida Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that sex offenders on probation can possess pornography so long as it does not relate to the offender's ``particular deviant behavior pattern.''

The 5-2 decision overturns a 2006 Third District Court of Appeal ruling on a Miami case in which that court said offenders cannot possess any sexually explicit material.

In the Miami case at issue, Donald Kasischke pleaded guilty in 2001 to three counts each of lewd or lascivious battery and exhibition on a 15-year-old boy. He was sentenced to a year in prison followed by two years of community control and eight years of probation.

A search of Kasischke's home after his release turned up pornographic photos and a videotape. He was hauled back to prison, which the Third DCA ruled was appropriate.

But the Supreme Court justices read the wording of the law, which included the phrase about relevance to an offender's deviant behavior pattern, and they decided Kasischke should not have been reincarcerated.

Kasischke, 61, is still locked up at Everglades Correctional Institution in South Miami-Dade County, but he will have a new hearing in Miami based on Thursday's favorable ruling.

''This case is a victory for due process and fair notice,'' said Thomas Regnier, the Miami-Dade County assistant public defender who represents Kasischke. ``Laws have to be clearly written so they're understandable. And when they're not clearly written, they can't be used against a defendant.''

In Florida, judges must impose certain conditions on sex offenders who are being released on probation. Conditions include curfews, completion of a treatment program and not being able to live within 1,000 feet of schools or playgrounds.

Another condition of release -- the one at issue in this case -- is explained in Florida's statutes:

``Unless otherwise indicated in the treatment plan provided by the sexual offender treatment program, a prohibition on viewing, accessing, owning or possessing any obscene, pornographic or sexually stimulating visual or auditory material, including telephone, electronic media, computer programs or computer services that are relevant to the offender's deviant behavior pattern.''

In writing the Supreme Court's ruling, Justice Raoul Cantero III noted that the court considered all possible interpretations of the wording.

The majority concluded that the phrase ''relevant to the offender's deviant behavior pattern'' included all items previously mentioned in the sentence. The justices who dissented -- R. Fred Lewis and Kenneth Bell -- argued that the language was meant to prohibit all pornographic materials.

Acknowledging the law's wording is ambiguous and open to multiple interpretations, Cantero said the court applied the rule of lenity to this case. That rule says ``when the language is susceptible of differing constructions, it shall be construed most favorably to the accused.'' ..News Source.. by EVAN S. BENN

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Generation XXX: Pornography Acceptance and Use Among Emerging Adults.

January 2008:

Abstract:
This study examined correlates of pornography acceptance and use within a normative (nonclinical) population of emerging adults (individuals aged 18—26). Participants included 813 university students (500 women; M age = 20 years) recruited from six college sites across the United States. Participants completed online questionnaires regarding their acceptance and use of pornography, as well as their sexual values and activity, substance use, and family formation values. Results revealed that roughly two thirds (67% ) of young men and one half (49%) of young women agree that viewing pornography is acceptable, whereas nearly 9 out of 10 (87%) young men and nearly one third (31%) of young women reported using pornography. Results also revealed associations between pornography acceptance and use and emerging adults' risky sexual attitudes and behaviors, substance use patterns, and nonmarital cohabitation values. The discussion considers the implications of pornography use during the transition to adulthood. ..more.. by Jason S. Carroll, Laura M. Padilla-Walker, Larry J. Nelson, Chad D. Olson, Carolyn McNamara Barry, Stephanie D. Madsen

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