A federal appeals court judge on Friday 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."
Prosecutor Kenneth Whitted, who had expressed dismay with one of Kozinski's earlier rulings in the case, declined to comment on the judge's recusal.
Isaacs, the defendant, said he was disappointed Kozinski was no longer the judge.
"I thought he was a fair judge," he said. "I feel terrible that my trial caused this information to come out."
He added, though, that it was somehow fitting for the trial, which he predicted would be a spectacle from the start. Isaacs planned to argue that his hard-core videos depicting acts of bestiality and defecation were works of art and therefore not legally obscene. Jurors spent several hours Wednesday watching the videos before the trial was interrupted.
"This whole trial is one big piece of performance art," Isaacs said. "I just can't imagine what's going to happen next."
The halting of Isaacs' trial came after The Times published an article on its website describing some of the sexually themed content on the judge's website. In an interview Tuesday, Kozinski had acknowledged posting the images but said he believed it was a private storage area that could not be accessed by the public. Had he known it was not properly protected, he said, he would have been more careful about the content he kept there. He acknowledged that some of the material was inappropriate but defended other items as funny. He said he must have uploaded some of the material by accident.
Following the interview, he blocked access to the site. After the story broke, the judge issued a statement saying his adult son told him that he may have placed some of the controversial material on the website.
