Alan analyses the upholding of the decision in the Glenn Marcus S/M trial:
Throughout the decision, Judge Ross exhibits a clear and articulate attempt to understand the differences between consensual BDSM and non-consensual criminal activity. She has numerous opportunities where she can take cheap shots at the S/m community by castigating them as freaks. But she does not. In fact, on several occasions, she endorses the rights of adults to legally engage in such activities, so long as there is consent. In this case, however, one of the parties argued that there was no consent. As a result, Judge Ross takes a careful analysis of the claims made by both Marcus and the victim. The judge indicates that the jury also carefully weighed the evidence and thus affirmed the findings of the jury.
Overall, this decision is actually a positive result for activists who support the right to engage in consensual S/m.
(more. . . )
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Howard J. Bashman
A man is arrested in Las Vegas on federal criminal charges of traveling across state lines with intent to engage in a sexual act with a minor and using an interstate communication facility to attempt to persuade a minor to engage in sexual acts. The evidence against the man consists of the transcripts of multiple online chats between the man and a police officer posing as a 14-year-old girl. On the date selected for their meeting, the man traveled from his home in Anaheim, Calif., to Las Vegas, where police apprehended him at the designated meeting place.
At trial, the man seeks to defend against the charges by maintaining that he believed that he was chatting with a 30- to 40-year-old woman who had been pretending to be an underage girl, and that he was expecting to meet that woman at the designated location in Las Vegas. When the man was arrested, he was carrying a personal digital assistant (PDA) containing more than 140 stories that described adults having sex with children. The prosecution sought to introduce many of these stories into evidence at trial, to rebut the man’s defense that he was not intending to meet an underage minor for sex. (more. . .)
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Under pressure from a disabilities rights group, Seattle Children’s hospital administrators admitted Tuesday that they violated the law by failing to consult a judge before removing the uterus of a severely disabled 6-year-old girl known as “Ashley.” But they said they stand by the procedure as appropriate for some children with special needs.
“We believe we acted in Ashley’s best interests,” said Dr. David Fisher, medical director of Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center, at a press conference.
Doctors say Ashley, 9, has the mental capacity of a three-month-old. With the blessing of the girl’s family, the hospital performed a hysterectomy, removed her breast buds and gave her hormone therapy — controversial procedures aimed at improving her quality of life by keeping her small and arresting her normal development into a sexually mature adult.
Washington state law forbids involuntary sterilization without court approval. A 38-page report first made public Tuesday by the Washington Protection and Advocacy System, a federally funded advocacy organization for people with disabilities, found that the hospital wrongly relied on the opinion of an attorney who advised Ashley’s family that a judge’s involvement was not necessary. (more. . . )
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BY JAMES T. MADORE
james.madore@newsday.com
April 26, 2007
ALBANY – Responding to concerns that the U.S. Supreme Court will overturn its decades-old Roe v. Wade abortion rights decision, Gov. Eliot Spitzer signaled yesterday his intention to enshrine those rights in state law.
Spitzer, in prepared remarks, said he planned to introduce a bill “establishing a fundamental, statutory right to privacy for women in making personal reproductive decisions.”
He also noted that abortion was legalized in New York in 1970, long before the Roe decision, but “our law became outdated,” the speech text reads.
Spitzer’s move came a week after the high court, in a 5-to-4 decision, upheld the federal ban on a specific late-term abortion procedure that opponents term “partial birth abortion.” The ruling was a reversal from prior decisions, and showed the impact of two newly appointed conservative justices. (more…)
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A Bentonville, AK resident is suing for trauma allegedly caused when his two sons stumbled across a sex guide book shelved with the military books at the library:
A Bentonville man asked the city to pay his two sons $20,000 and to fire the library director for including what he called “pornography” in the Bentonville Public Library collection.
“The Whole Lesbian Sex Book” by Felice Newman was removed from the library shelf after Earl Adams of Bentonville complained it is “patently offensive and lacks any artistic, literary or scientific value,” according to a letter he wrote and faxed Feb. 16 to Mayor Bob McCaslin.
Adams said his 14- and 16-year-old sons, Kyle and Ryan, looked at the book while the 14-year-old was browsing for material on military academies. He requested the city pay him $10,000 per child, the maximum allowed under the Arkansas obscenity law.
Author Felice Newman said in a press release today:
Boys have been pouring over sexually explicit materials in libraries since – well, since there have been libraries. Why was a copy of my book in the military section? Well, sometimes young people browsing the library shelves will tuck away a favorite book where they can find it later. These two young guys are the very reason libraries must be uncensored, and librarians must be free to order the books they feel will benefit the public.â€
I pulled the the Library Journal review off Amazon.com:
Newman’s sex guide for lesbians is superb. Why can’t more heterosexual sex manuals be this good? Newman, who, as the publisher at Cleis Press since 1980 has edited many other sex books, covers oral, manual, anal, and insertive-vaginal techniques with loving care. She includes a whole chapter on breast play, addresses safety repeatedly and thoroughly, and discusses transgender and bisexual orientations, SM, group sex, masturbation, and sex toys–all while acknowledging that some women prefer monogamy, some polygamy. Her bibliography and resource list are simply outstanding. Newman’s work updates and embodies the best of the half -dozen other lesbian sex manuals in print) all acknowledged in her bibliography). Even though this book is aimed at lesbians, it’s extremely suitable for heterosexual women (to enhance their own eroticism) and men (to tell them what turns women on). For all public libraries.
(reviewed by Martha Cornog, Philadelphia. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc)
You can send a message of support to the Bentonville Public Library here.
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A Manhattan jury found four women guilty of gang assault for attacking a man outside the IFC Center last summer. The man, Dwayne Buckle of Queens, said that the group of lesbians attacked him because he was straight, while the women contended Buckle had used slurs and threw a cigarette at them – and that another man stabbed him.
Patreese Johnson, who claimed Buckle said, “I’ll f— you straight” to her, was found not guilty of second degree attempted murder, but was found guilty of first degree assault. She faces 5-25 years of prison time, while Renata Hill, Terrain Dandridge, and Venice Brown were found guilty of second degree gang assault, which means 3.5-15 years of prison time. Three of their friends pleaded guilty before trial to lesser counts.
The women were jailed without bail, and the AP reports that State Supreme Court Justice Edward McLaughlin explained to their lawyers, “There’s simply no point in talking. They’re out of state residents facing mandatory prison time.” The women, who are from NJ, called out, “No-oo!†“Mommy!†and “I didn’t do it!†as they were led from the courtroom, and the Post reports that “some of their friends and family members threw water bottles and spat at photographers.” Buckle told the Daily News, “I’m stabbed and I have a scar that will be with me for the rest of my life. They have their jail sentences, but they’ll be out soon. This is what I get for being a nice guy.” Uh, nice guy who called them names, though.
The women’s lawyers said they will appeal and defense lawyer Susan Tipograph added, “These are seven decent and nice young women who came into the city to have a good time. They were hit upon by an abusive homophobic man. Now they’re all going to state prison.”
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By MARTIN FACKLER and CHOE SANG-HUN
TOKYO, April 17 — A group of Japanese researchers on Tuesday publicly challenged Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s denials that Japan’s military coerced women into sexual slavery during World War II, citing reports compiled by Allied investigators immediately after the war.
The reports, based partly on interrogations of Japanese prisoners, were originally submitted to the Tokyo war crimes trials, which ended in 1948, as evidence of atrocities by Japan during its wartime expansion across Asia. The reports include accounts of Japanese soldiers and sailors rounding up foreign women for use as sex slaves, euphemistically known here as comfort women.
Mr. Abe and other conservatives have repeatedly said there was no evidence that Japan’s military had a direct hand in forcing women into sexual slavery. Many Japanese conservatives have cited the lack of corroborating official documents to dismiss the testimony of former sex slaves, who started coming forward in the 1990s to tell their stories.
While the evidence presented Tuesday was not new, the group’s members said they felt obliged to respond to Mr. Abe’s denials. The group’s public rebuttal of Mr. Abe was a rare protest in a country where the prime minister’s remarks had stirred little outcry. The reaction has been much stronger in the rest of Asia, where memories of Japanese aggression remain raw, highlighting Tokyo’s isolation on war history.
(more…)
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Law blogger Denise Howell writes:
Late last month, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals came out with an important decision, Perfect 10 v. CCBill (PDF), that required it to interpret and apply both the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — two of the most important U.S. provisions governing conduct on the Live Web. Jason Schultz, Professor Goldman, and Joe Gratz all have good summaries of the details.
First, see Jason’s rundown of the parties and facts of the case:
Background: Perfect 10 publishes adult entertainment magazines and websites. Many third-party websites post Perfect 10 images without permission. CCBill et al provide hosting and credit card services to those sites. Perfect 10 sued CCBill et al. for assisting in the infringement of their copyrights and associated state claims, such as violating the rights of publicity of Perfect 10 models. CCBill raised, among other defenses, the DMCA Safe Harbors and Section 230 of the CDA.
Next, there’s a lot of meat to the opinion and I encourage you to check out all three of the discussions linked above. But the most interesting part of the decision to me, particularly in the context of the pending Viacom v. YouTube suit, is the court’s take on what constitutes a “direct financial benefit” sufficient to preclude a defendant’s successful invocation of the DMCA’s safe harbor language. Once again from Jason:
The Court held that a provider falls outside the protections of 512(c) if they receive “direct financial benefit” from infringing conduct, and that this term should be interpreted consistent with the “similarly-worded common law standard for vicarious copyright liability.” The Court then went on to state that the relevant inquiry was “whether the infringing activity constitutes a draw for subscribers, not just an added benefit.” Since CWIE (the hosting co-defendant) hosted sites for a fee unrelated to the amount of infringing material, the court found this did not qualify as a direct financial benefit.
(more…)
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WASHINGTON (AP) — High-priced call girls always seem to have their little black books. Deborah Jeane Palfrey, accused of running an illegal escort service in the nation’s capital, has 46 pounds of phone records.
And her offer — or threat — to turn them over to the media has some in Washington playing a guessing game as to whether any Beltway movers and shakers are on her list of up to 15,000 client phone numbers.
The 50-year-old alleged D.C. Madam was indicted earlier this month by a federal grand jury on charges of running a high-class call girl ring in the Washington area from her home in Vallejo, California. She has denied the escort service engaged in prostitution.
In court records, prosecutors estimate that her business, Pamela Martin and Associates, generated more than $2 million in revenue over 13 years, with more than 130 women employed at various times to serve thousands of clients at $200 to $300 a session.
Her home was raided months ago, but the case attracted little interest until earlier this month, when Palfrey announced that to raise money for her defense, she intended to sell her phone records to any news outlet willing to pay. (more…)
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John Wirenius (a former public defender), comments on the press conference held yesterday by North Carolina’s Attorney General Roy Cooper regarding of the dropping of charges in the Duke lacrosse team rape case:
…Two things stand out for me in Cooper’s press conference:
First, Cooper was willing to criticize, in genuinely scathing terms, a sitting District Attorney for abusing defendants’ rights. I practiced as a public defender for three years in New York City’s Legal Aid Society, doing criminal appeals. I had several cases that presented instances of DA misconduct at the trial level. It takes a high showing before the State admits error, and it certainly seldom does so so overtly, and in such detail.
Second, and more importantly, Cooper went far further than I envisioned; a cautious state lawyer would have merely said that there was “insufficient evidence to support a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt” and dismissed the charges. Cooper went remarkably far to try to give the accused their reputations back, going so far as to state:
Based on the significant inconsistencies between the evidence and the various accounts given by the accusing witness, we believe that these three individuals are innocent of these charges,” Cooper said at the news conference today. Although rape victims often give accounts that contain inconsistencies, he said, in this case they were overwhelming and could not be reconciled with other evidence. Eyewitness identification procedures used in the case were unreliable, no DNA evidence or other witness confirmed the accuser’s story, and “she contradicts herself,” Cooper said. All this “led us to the conclusion that no attack occurred,” he said.
(more…)
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By DUFF WILSON
RALEIGH, N.C. April 11 — All remaining charges were dropped today against three former Duke University lacrosse players who had been accused of rape more than a year ago, North Carolina’s attorney general announced, concluding a three-month investigation of a racially charged case that polarized and outraged many in the state and nation.
An independent investigation “showed clearly that there is insufficient evidence to proceed,†Roy A. Cooper, the state attorney general, said at a televised news conference. “ We believe these individuals are innocent.â€
He said the accounts of the events given by the woman who made the accusations were so inconsistent that they were not credible. “She contradicts herself,†Mr. Cooper said.
“In this case, the inconsistencies were so significant and so contrary to the evidence that we have no credible evidence that an attack occurred in that house on that night,†he said.
The decision brings to an end a 13-month ordeal for the young men, two of whom were dismissed from Duke because of the charges. (more…)
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Noted technology expert, author and blogger Kathy Sierra cancelled her presentation at ETech, because of a series of escalating online harassment, death threats and sexual attacks:
As I type this, I am supposed to be in San Diego, delivering a workshop at the ETech conference. But I’m not. I’m at home, with the doors locked, terrified. For the last four weeks, I’ve been getting death threat comments on this blog. But that’s not what pushed me over the edge. What finally did it was some disturbing threats of violence and sex posted on two other blogs… blogs authored and/or owned by a group that includes prominent bloggers. People you’ve probably heard of. People like respected Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Chris Locke (aka Rageboy).
…Most of all, I now fully understand the impact of death threats. It really doesn’t make much difference whether the person intends to act on the threat… it’s the threat itself that inflicts the damage. It’s the threat that makes you question whether that “anonymous” person is as disturbed as their comments and pictures suggest.
It’s the threat that causes fear.
It’s the threat that leads you to a psychiatrist and tranquilizers just so you can sleep without repeating the endless loop of your death by:
* throat slitting
* hanging
* suffocation
and don’t forget the sexual part…
I have cancelled all speaking engagements.
I am afraid to leave my yard.
I will never feel the same. I will never be the same.
Why is it necessary to sexualize an attack (with graphic, Photoshopped pics) against such a talented and smart woman? Why is internet culture so misogynistic and ugly towards women (i.e. AutoAdmit)?
Please visit her blog, and lend your support. And please be careful out there.
[via Scobelizer]
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PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania (AP) — A federal judge on Thursday dealt another blow to government efforts to control Internet pornography, striking down a 1998 U.S. law that makes it a crime for commercial Web site operators to let children access “harmful” material.
In the ruling, the judge said parents can protect their children through software filters and other less restrictive means that do not limit the rights of others to free speech.
“Perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if (free speech) protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection,” wrote Senior U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed Jr., who presided over a four-week trial last fall.
The law would have criminalized Web sites that allow children to access material deemed “harmful to minors” by “contemporary community standards.” The sites would have been expected to require a credit card number or other proof of age. Penalties included a $50,000 fine and up to six months in prison.
Sexual health sites, the online magazine Salon.com and other Web sites backed by the American Civil Liberties Union challenged the law. They argued that the Child Online Protection Act was unconstitutionally vague and would have had a chilling effect on speech.
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld a temporary injunction in 2004 on grounds the law was likely to be struck down and was perhaps outdated.
Technology experts said parents now have more serious concerns than Web sites with pornography. For instance, the threat of online predators has caused worries among parents whose children use social-networking sites such as News Corp.’s MySpace.
(more…)
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Tristan writes about the Glenn Marcus BDSM trial (and also mentions Alan):
I don’t know enough about Marcus and Jodi to know if there were some serious personality flaws lurking beneath their chosen roles. What is clear is that the relationship began as consensual but, for Jodi, at some point this changed. It’s possible that she regretted her participation and re-wrote her role into an unwilling victim, but it’s equally likely that Marcus lost touch with reality, believed he actually owned her, and behaved accordingly. The relationship was even thornier because it was entwined with a for-profit business. Masters and mistresses order their slaves to do lots of things: clean the house, lick Mistress’s boots, give Master a blowjob, and so on. When Marcus made his slave do things or he did things to her, there was profit to be made from it—more specifically, from the photos he took and posted on Slavespace.com, which was membership-based. Furthermore, he tasked her with working on technical aspects of the site and considered that part of her service to him as a slave, so he didn’t pay her. (Sources I spoke to said they both lived off the site’s profits.)
We may never know the whole truth of this he-say-she-say story, but jurors determined that Marcus crossed the line. Alan, a lawyer who spoke to several experts who testified and who blogged about the trial (alanesq.livejournal.com), told me he believes Marcus’s fate probably hinged on the fact that Jodi consented to non-consensual play—a concept not unheard of among players, but one which negates the consent.
(more…)
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Former “American Idol” finalist Mario Vasquez is facing accusations that he tried to masturbate in front of a male employee in a bathroom on the set of the hit show in February 2005. Shortly thereafter, Vasquez mysteriously dropped out of “Idol,” citing personal reasons.
According to the lawsuit filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court and obtained by TMZ, Vazquez allegedly “sexually harassed” Magdaleno Olmos, assistant accountant for Fremantle Media, the company that produces American Idol.
(more…)
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