Obscenity and Ira Isaacs

An upcoming trial will screen hours of hard-core fetish pornography as Ira Isaacs faces a trial on obscenity charges.

If all goes according to plan, an otherwise stately federal courtroom in downtown Los Angeles will be converted into a makeshift movie theater this week, screening a series of graphic sexual fetish videos.

At issue is how a jury will define obscenity in a region that boasts its status as the capital of the pornography industry and at a time when technology has made the taboo adult flicks of a generation ago available to a mainstream audience.

Hollywood filmmaker Ira Isaacs says the videos he sells are works of art, protected under the Constitution. Federal prosecutors contend the movies are criminally obscene.

The prosecution is the first in Southern California by a U.S. Department of Justice task force formed in 2005 after influential Christian conservative groups appealed to the Bush administration to crack down on smut.

For jurors to determine whether Isaacs' work is obscene, they will have to view hours of hard-core pornography so degrading that in one film, an actress cries throughout, prosecutors said in court papers.

But if jurors find that any of the four videos at issue in the case have any literary, scientific or artistic value, the work is not legally obscene, according to a 1973 Supreme Court ruling.

In a statistic that some may find every bit as shocking as his work, Isaacs said he was selling about 1,000 videos per month at $30 apiece before being raided by the FBI early last year.  Isaacs predicted that many jurors would not be able to stomach viewing the movies, some of which feature acts of bestiality and defecation.

The indictment alleges that Isaacs shipped obscene videos outside the state of California.

Presiding over the trial will be Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Kozinski was assigned the case as part of a rotation in which he and other appeals court judges occasionally oversee criminal trials in addition to deciding appeals.

His involvement in the case may be a stroke of luck for Isaacs. That's because Kozinski is seen as a staunch defender of free speech. When he learned that there were filters banning pornography and other materials from computers in the appeals court's Pasadena offices, he led a successful effort to have the filters removed.

Judging the Judge

See full article from X Biz

The obscenity trial of “shock artist” Ira Isaacs has now been suspended as questions arose today following a Los Angeles Times report in which the trial judge said he kept sexually explicit pictures and videos on his personal website.

Judge Alex Kozinski granted the joint motion to suspend the trial after the prosecution claimed it needed time to investigate the matter. The jury is expected to return on Monday.

Earlier today, the LA Times published a report in which Kozinski reveals that he maintained explicit photos and videos on a subdomain of his publicly accessible website, Alex.Kozinski.com.

The Times reports that Kozinski’s explicit material was extensive. There were images of masturbation, public sex and contortionist sex. There was a slide show striptease featuring a transsexual and a folder that contained a series of photos of women's crotches as seen through snug-fitting clothing or underwear. There also were themes of defecation and urination, though they are not presented in a sexual context.

Kozinski claims that the images were not accessible to the general public, and though some were “inappropriate,” he kept them to share with friends.

A federal appeals court judge has stepped down from a high-profile obscenity trial in Los Angeles, three days after acknowledging that he had posted sexually explicit material on a publicly accessible personal website.

In light of the public controversy surrounding my involvement in this case, I have concluded that there is a manifest necessity to declare a mistrial, wrote Alex Kozinski, chief judge for the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals: I will recuse myself from further participation in the case and will ask the chief judge of the district court to reassign it to another judge.

On Wednesday, Kozinski suspended the trial of Hollywood filmmaker Ira Isaacs to allow the prosecutor to explore what he saw as a potential conflict of interest concerning the court having a . . . sexually explicit website with similar material to what is on trial here.

Update: Supreme Double Jeopardy

22nd February 2010. See article from xbiz.com

The Ira Isaacs obscenity case could be headed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

It's not certain whether justices will take his appeal, but Isaacs' attorney has asked a lower court on Tuesday not to send any pretrial proceedings relative to his retrial until the highest court in the country decides.

Obscenity Prosecution Task Force attorneys don't oppose the request, Isaacs attorney Roger Jon Diamond told XBIZ:  You never know if the justices will take the case, but I'm upbeat, Diamond said.

Isaacs' obscenity case was put on hold last year after Judge Alex Kozinski recused himself after it was revealed that he used a website to distribute sexually explicit photos and videos.

Diamond contends that Isaacs shouldn't be retried because there was no manifest necessity for the declaration of the mistrial, which was declared without Isaacs' consent, and that it would amount to double jeopardy, a procedural defense hat forbids a defendant from being tried twice for the same crime on the same set of facts.

Isaacs has until May 3 to file a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court to request review.

t was almost five years ago, on July 24, 2007, that the original government indictment against Ira Isaacs was filed in a U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. After two failed attempts to nail him for obscenity in the intervening years, the Justice Department is going for a third swing at the Ira Isaacs ball. On Monday, the parties will gather at 8:30 a.m. in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom for jury selection.

The last attempt failed when the jury didn't agree on a verdict.

A Los Angeles jury has just found Ira Isaacs guilty on all five counts in his obscenity trial.

The jury began deliberating the charges of producing, selling and shipping the four charged movies:

• Mako's First Time Scat,
• Hollywood Scat Amateurs 7 and 10,
• Japanese Doggie 3 Way

Isaacs looked pensive as the jury filed into the courtroom, and was visibly shaken as the jury foreman read the guilty verdicts on the five counts, each of which could net him five years in (likely) a minimum security federal prison.

Isaacs' attorney Roger Jon Diamond told AVN that he felt his client had several grounds for appeal, but a final decision as to whether Isaacs will appeal the verdicts has not yet been reached.

Offsite Comment: If Porn Isn't Art, Does It Still Have a Right to Exist?

Ira Isaacs basic defence was that hi work was art.

3rd May 2012. See article from thedailybeast.com, thanks to Nick

Obviously Hollywood Scat Amateurs #10 was never intended to be art, and that's the real problem with the art argument: it covers up what's truly valuable about these films, which is that they allow us to critique of the notion of obscenity itself.

The California obscenity statute defines prurience as a morbid, degrading, unhealthy interest in sex. But this sells all sexual minorities down the river. Is it more degrading to see a representation of your desire, or be deemed perverted by the state? In 2012, should the state still be passing judgment on the consensual sex lives of others?

In the end, the jury pronounced Isaacs guilty on all counts and got home before rush hour. That's not surprising, given that they'd been instructed not to consider what a deviant subset might find normal, or even what they themselves might find normal, but instead to imagine the values of the community at large. Even in Central District of California---the home not only of the nation's porn industry, but also of bedroom communities from San Luis Obispo to Orange County---that leaves a lot of room for sexual missteps.

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