In an era when pornography has exploded on the Web almost beyond measure, Ms. Fletcher is one of only a handful of people to have been singled out for prosecution on obscenity charges by the Bush administration. She faces six felony counts for operating a Web site called Red Rose, which featured detailed fictional accounts of the molesting, torture and sometimes gruesome murders of children under the age of 10, mostly girls....
The Fletcher case has been brought by Mary Beth Buchanan, the United States attorney for Western Pennsylvania, who is regarded by many people in the pornography industry and by outside analysts as the government’s most aggressive opponent of the spread of pornography in the nation....
Although a narrowly divided Supreme Court said in 1973 that images were not necessary to label a work obscene, there has not been a successful obscenity prosecution in the country that did not involve drawings or photographs since then.
Courts have overturned or blocked convictions connected to other nonillustrated books, including the well-known “Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure,” on the basis that sexual images have a fundamentally different impact than words alone. ...
About the same time the Fletcher case goes to trial, Ms. Buchanan will be prosecuting a second obscenity trial in the same courthouse involving a large-scale producer of pornographic films called Extreme Associates, based in California. The company’s films depicted women being gang-raped and defecated on.
In addition to those cases, Ms. Buchanan said in the interview that she had several more in the pipeline.
Todd Lochner, an assistant professor at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore., who has written about prosecutorial decision-making in obscenity cases, said that Ms. Buchanan had established herself as the nation’s foremost obscenity prosecutor. “I can’t think of anybody who is as aggressive as she is,” Professor Lochner said.
Ms. Buchanan said she selected cases that she hoped would have deterrent effects on other pornographers.
“We want producers to know that these things are not tolerated,” she said. Ms. Buchanan said that the rarity of obscenity prosecutions during the eight years of the Clinton administration meant that the pornography industry had come to believe that law enforcement had tacitly “agreed to an anything-goes approach.” ...
While pornography by itself is not illegal, it can be prosecuted as obscenity if it fits the definition laid out by the Supreme Court more than 30 years ago. Under that ruling, Miller v. California, a work may be deemed obscene if, taken as a whole, it lacks artistic, literary or scientific merit, depicts certain conduct in a patently offensive manner, and violates contemporary community standards.
Despite stirring anti-pornography speeches by both heads of the Justice Department during the Bush administration — John Ashcroft and, more recently, Alberto R. Gonzales — there have been fewer than two dozen federal obscenity prosecutions that did not also involve charges of child pornography. The making and possession of child pornography, a separate category, has, however, been prosecuted widely. (Ms. Fletcher is not being prosecuted for any violations of the child pornography laws.)...
The indictment, which has the potential for a long prison term, charges Ms. Fletcher with commercial involvement with obscenity because she charged people $10 to join her group. Jerome Mooney, another of her lawyers, argued in court that the fee barely covered her expenses and was imposed only because she believed using a credit card requirement would prevent minors from signing into the site. In the end, only 29 people subscribed, at least one of whom is likely to have been a police informant.
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