Jury selection is expected to begin today. 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 is 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.
"I did some rabble-rousing about it," Kozinski said in a brief interview last week. He said he was made aware of the issue when a law clerk researching a case was banned from accessing a gay bookstore's website.
"I didn't think the bureaucrats in Washington should decide what the federal judiciary should have access to," the judge said. "I thought that was incredibly arrogant for them to decide on their own."
Kozinski declined to comment on any aspect of the Isaacs case.
Isaacs said he would testify as his own expert witness at trial and planned to lecture jurors on how perceptions of art have changed over the years. There was a time, he said, when the works of authors James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence were called obscene.
The point, Isaacs said, "is do we really want to throw artists in jail in America?"
Kenneth Whitted, the Justice Department prosecutor assigned to the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force, declined to be interviewed for this report.
According to the Justice Department's website, the task force "is dedicated exclusively to the protection of America's children and families through the enforcement of our Nation's obscenity laws."
The task force has won convictions in more than a dozen cases, the vast majority resulting from plea bargains, according to case summaries provided by the department. Only a few defendants have elected to fight the charges at trial. Punishment in most cases included some prison time, ranging from one to seven years, as well as stiff fines and forfeiture of proceeds.
At a time when even hard-core pornography is available in major hotels, through cable companies and on the Internet, prosecutors have focused their efforts on particularly outrageous material, often involving sex with animals and defecation.
