Posted on 07/03/2009 9:06:37 AM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
Washington, D.C. (AHN) - An Appeals court admonished a federal judge on Thursday for keeping sexually explicit material in a home computer that was publicly accessible.
Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, had called for a judicial misconduct investigation into his own actions June 2008 in response to a Los Angeles Times story the same year that said sexually explicit material was posted on his website at the same time as he was presiding over an obscenity trial in Los Angeles.
In response to the report, Kozinski immediately suspended the obscenity trial to consider recusing himself, and requested a probe of the allegations against him.
He declared a mistrial in the obscenity trial. His complaint was also transferred from the Ninth Circuit to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
The Third Circuit cleared him of any wrongdoing and said he was "credible and thoroughly responsive to all the questions" during the investigation, but also chastised him for being "judicially imprudent."
"Once the Judge became aware in 2007 that offensive material could be accessed by members of the public, his inattention to the need for prompt corrective action amounted to a disregard of a serious risk of public embarrassment," Chief Judge Anthony Scirica wrote in the opinion.
"We join with the Special Committee in admonishing the Judge that his conduct exhibiting poor judgment with respect to this material created a public controversy that can reasonably be seen as having resulted in embarrassment to the institution of the federal judiciary. We determine that the Judge's acknowledgment of responsibility together with other corrective action, his apology, and our admonishment, combined with the public dissemination of this opinion, properly conclude this proceeding," Scirica added.
The inquiry had found that Konzinski's home computer had a directory called alex that stored many files such as 7,000 family photographs and material received over the years by e-mail.
A subdirectory of this directory, called stuff, served to "keep a wide variety of items he had received by e-mail, among which were television commercials, video clips from television shows and other sources, publicly available court filings and other written materials, cartoons, animated videos and games, song parodies, and photographs of other subjects. Some of the material was sexually suggestive; a portion of that material was sexually explicit."
The alex directory became publicly accessible in 2002, when the Kozinski family decided to connect the home server to the Internet in order to access personal files while away from home. The directory was intended for private use, but was also used by Kozinski to share links to personal photographs with family and close friends. In December 2007, the files in the subdirectory were indexed by Yahoo and are believed to have been available through other Internet search engines.
Just a quick comment about the judge. He’s one of the conservative members of the 9th Circuit and that’s why IMO the LA Times went after him. If he’d been a liberal member of the 9th Circuit they’d never have written the story. Which was shown to be very slanted, biased and had a number of problems with accuracy. IMO the decision that this article is about was a PC one where the problem wasn’t with the material itself but that it allowed the left to distort it and use it to embarrass the courts not that he had anything that was really bad.
Does this bother anyone else? How the hell was Yahoo able to access the files?
While connecting his personal archive to the public server was a dumbass thing to do, it was more about computer ignorance than malevolence. I read about the photos described, and they sounded like the stuff all of us get over email -- a bear dancing with a naked Park Ranger, cats in bikinis, that sort of PhotoShop joke email that makes the rounds. This was a political hit job. Where are the photos of Barney Frank's boy toy's brothel operation?
The larger question is, when are public officials, elected to high positions going to learn that they are still accountable for their actions, and that putting juvenile content into public websites is going to result in real discipline?
--judging by what was published about the judge's files, I probably have equally explicit material on my computer---
He is certainly an endangered species, but don’t look for him to get protection from what laughingly calls itself our government today.
There are a number of them on the court but there are also a lot of extreme liberals like Judge Reinhardt who is married to the ACLU Los Angeles Chapter Ramona Ripston (current or former Executive Director of this chapter. Haven’t kept track of her lately) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Reinhar http://www.theweeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/414ilyss.asp He’s one the most reversed judge before SCOTUS and if the case doesn’t make it to SCOUS his opinion becomes the law in 9th circuit. He like the other liberal who have strong ties to the ALCU (one was Executive Director of another chapter of the ACLU for Northern California) also doesn’t recuse himself when the ACLU is part of the case
Sounds like he set the computer up as a web server on the Internet so the family could access it and share files. Probably one of his kids set it up. No security. No firewall.
It is amazing how many people think they have some security by default when they open up their computer files on the Internet. Search engines like Yahoo are designed to find things that are not specifically blocked. Add in hackers who work to find things that aren't blocked well enough and you better know what you are doing before connecting a shared resource to the net.
“That man is an endangered species, and probably qualifies for government protection.”
But if he’s white and/or Christian, the new AG says he’s not prtected under ‘Hate Crimes’ law. Go figger!
Bless his heart, he probably does a lot of self probing in front of his computer. *SNORT* *SNORT*
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