The phrase “jury of your peers” was purposeful wording and, I imagine, purposefully did not say “judge of your peers.” Federal Judge Alex Kozinsky might disagree he’s a peer of “poo porn” “shock artist” Ira Isaacs, whose obscenity trial Kozinsky was overseeing. But if not in the same club, they’re at least in the same ballpark.
You could say, if you wanted to put it in the nicest (read: stretchiest) way possible, that Kozinsky’s liberal attitude was right for a freedom of speech trial such as this, and that the LA Times revelation that Kosinsky was storing, well, alternative pornography on his publicly-accessible website sort of specially qualified him for judging the case.
After all, if he found naked women painted as cows, bestiality, transsexual stripteases and contortionist sex “funny,” he shouldn’t find it too hard to stomach a little coprophilia. We wouldn’t subject a more conservative judge to 2 Girls One Cup, would we?
If you haven’t heard of this by now, expect that it will be on the news all weekend. But we’ll review the perfect-for-the-news-of-today story. The trial of Ira Isaacs has him facing a couple of decades in prison if convicted for distributing obscenity. Like the Larry Flint trial, this one is pretty high profile as the government tries once again to define what is obscene—and in this case, 99% of the people at least may agree Isaac’s style of adult media is, by a million feet over the line, obscene.
Luck of the draw landed this case in the federal courtroom of Kozinsky, who once successfully lobbied against the monitoring of federal judge’s computers, calling a policing of their state-owned computers a violation of the wire-tapping laws. The Wall Street Journal reported him as having a “great interest in keeping pornography available to judges.
A little into the trial, Kozinsky had to suspend after lawyers brought up a potential conflict of interest: some disturbing pornography and even MP3’s available on a sub-domain of the judge’s website, accessible by the public. The judge said he wasn’t aware the public could access it, thought maybe his son had uploaded some of the material, but otherwise admitted to storing some raunchy “funny” images people had sent him and that he had sent to friends of his.
Like a guy performing you-know-what on himself.
Kozinsky officially closed the site in question after the LA Times busted him.
