"That's the spirit!"
Posted on 02/18/2003 12:20:42 PM PST by AdA$tra
For the next two years, a former parochial school teacher in Wichita will have the government watching his every move on the Internet, as part of a plea agreement in a rare federal obscenity case against him.
Jeffrey Klazura, 30, was sentenced for possessing two pictures of adult women posing nude on his home computer.
He was ordered to provide passwords to the government. And federal probation officers can check his computer at any time, or attach software to let them watch his online activity. If he goes to the wrong site, he could be sentenced to prison.
"I'm not familiar with many, if any, prosecutions involving obscenity when the subject is an adult women. That's virtually unheard of," Barry Steinhardt, of the American Civil Liberties Union, said Monday.
A New York-based nonprofit national interfaith organization called Morality in Media Inc. found only seven prosecutions nationwide under any U.S. obscenity law in 2001, the most recent year available. The group also found that many states, including Kansas, hadn't prosecuted a single obscenity case in the years since 1993.
Klazura, who was sentenced earlier this month, got into trouble when he asked a Yahoo photo service to convert pictures of young-looking females from electronic form to photo prints, according to court documents filed by the U.S. Postal Service.
Yahoo notified authorities. After Yahoo told Klazura in an e-mail that the pictures could be illegal, he immediately canceled his order, court records show. But the postal inspector got permission from federal authorities to deliver Klazura's canceled order, leading to his arrest and giving authorities the right to search his home computer.
Klazura was charged with child pornography because the females in some of the photographs delivered to his home looked young. Their ages weren't established in court documents.
After Klazura's lawyer, Dan Monnat, accused the government of trapping Klazura into a criminal action, the U.S. attorney offered a plea for the lesser obscenity charges, stemming from the two pictures of nude adult women found on his home computer.
Last Modified: 11:36 p.m. - 2/17/2003
This doesn't pass the smell test. This is WOD warrior tactics of the worst kind. The last time I looked Playboy and other "gentlemen" magazines are still legal.
What I want to know is if they were both posing on his computer at the same time. He must have a very big computer.
Oh, never mind...this is Associated Press English.
Hank
Sounds vaguely like entrapment to me. Perhaps the goverment can use this same logic and go through your old National Geographic collection, and ....
Not rare enough, given that the Constitution does not give the federal government the authority to do this at all.
I wouldn't mind knowing what it is.
Had they been pictures of a nude, hunky State Trooper and a pretty choir boy, however, prosecution of him would have been a Hate Crime...
Jesse Sharpless ... John Haines . .. George Haines ... John Steel . . . Ephraim Martin . . . and --- Mayo . . . designing, contriving, and intending the morals, as well of youth as of divers other citizens of this commonwealth, to debauch and corrupt, and to raise and create in their minds inordinate and lustful desires . . . in a certain house there . . . scandalously did exhibit and show for money ... a certain lewd ... obscene painting, representing a man in an obscene ... and indecent posture with a woman, to the manifest corruption and subversion of youth, and other] citizens of this commonwealth . . . offending . . . [the] dignity of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
The defendants have been convicted, upon their own confession, of conduct indicative of great moral depravity. . . . This court is ... invested with power to punish not only open violations of decency and morality, but also whatever secretly tends to undermine the principles of society. . .. Whatever tends to the destruction of morality, in general, may be punished criminally. Crimes are public offenses, not because they are perpetrated publicly, but because their effect is to injure the public. Burglary, though done in secret, is a public offense; and secretly destroying fences is indictable. Hence, it follows, that an offense may be punishable, if in its nature and by its example, it tends to the corruption of morals; although it be not committed in public.
The defendants are charged with exhibiting and showing . .. for money, a lewd . . . and obscene painting. A picture tends to excite lust, as strongly as a writing; and the showing of picture is as much a publication as the selling of a book. . . . If the privacy of the room was a protection, all the youth of the city might be corrupted, by taking them, one by one, into a chamber, and there inflaming their passions by the exhibition of lascivious pictures. In the eye of the law, this would be a publication, and a most pernicious one.
Although every immoral act, such as lying, etc., is not indict able, yet where the offense charged is destructive of morality in general ... it is punishable at common law. The destruction of morality renders the power of the government invalid. . . . The corruption of the public mind, in general, and debauching the manners of youth, in particular, by lewd and obscene pictures exhibited to view, must necessarily be attended with the most injurious consequences.. . . No man is permitted to corrupt the morals of the people; secret poison cannot be thus disseminated.
"That's the spirit!"
Maybe he gets the last laugh. Maybe that was his fetish in the first place.
For once, back that up. Nothing in this story, nothing points to any illegal wrong doing on his part. I'm waiting.
You've been here too long to think that this is the 'unthinkable'. He's being made an example of. We both know that. Why he is is the serious question.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.