A Rare Victory against HM Customs

Although Customs have generally got the system stitched up massively in their favour they have occasionally failed to get their way. The stitch up seems to work as follows:

1. Customs arbitrarily decide whether that goods are obscene.
2. Customs give you the following options: Either agree not to contest the confiscation in which case the matter goes no further or contest the decision in the magiststrates court where the downside is a potential prison sentence. Guess which option most people elect? Of course this then means that Customs don't receive much feedback on what is considered obscene.
3. If one proceeds onto the magistrates court one finds that magistrates are not generally noted for their liberal attitudes towards porn and they tend to rubber stamp the decisions made by Customs.

So it was excellent to hear that the British artist, Brian Williams had gained a victory in the magistrates courts, the first success in a case of this type.

Brian Williams had shot a series of photographs during the making of the short film Stealth. The film is an exploration of auto-erotic death inspired by FBI crime scene shots. The film is said to be neutral in tone and merely investigates in a form that is neither documentary nor drama. The images are very clearly fakes. They depict death scenes, bloodstains, bondage equipment, and body outlines on the floor.

The police were aware of the work and had previously asked the artist to remove the pictures from public view at an art show. Perhaps the artist had therefore got on some customs black list because the photos were seized at Heathrow from a courier company bringing them back from the US.

Some of the pictures were declared obscene without ever justifying their criteria, Customs then tried several times to get the artist to agree to their destruction without going to court but the artist would have none of it. In fact Customs were so sure that the case would not be contested that when the day of the trial came, Customs had to ask for an adjournment as they had not prepared a case.

Customs then predictable upped the charge to "Knowingly importing obscene material" carrying a possible prison sentence. This appears to be pure intimidation as the charge was lowered to a lesser one minutes before the trial.

The trial was won with the assistance of a clever barrister who put the Customs officer on the spot by asking him to decide from a series of images which were obscene. These included mainstream advertising pictures, those freely on sale in bookshops, pictures from the collection that had previously been returned and of course those retained Customs. The officer failed the test and coupled with a failure in their argument that the pictures were obscene if taken out of context this led to a verdict of no case to answer. Customs were ordered to return the pictures and pay the defence costs. In a final irony they did not even know of the procedure to return the photos. The loss of a case had never been known before.