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Pizzalawyer ago

kudos to everyone trying to.understand obscenity laws; Im not sure I understand them myself so I will just speak.in broad generalities. Such laws and court interpretaions can be found in both federal.and state jurisdictions. Interstate commerce by way of mail or computer communication gives the feds the right to impose laws while the states have an inherent right to protect the welfare of its citizens. Sometimes there is both federal and state jurisdiction and one agency may defer to another or alternatively may.embark on a joint operation to.carry out law enforcement.

Miller remains good law but the challenge for law enforcement are the definitions of the applicable standards. What is an offense against community standards can be one thing for Las Vegas and a different thing for Warren, Pennsylvania. And how do you arrive at a community standard where the world wide Internet is involved? There is no local community. Standards also evolve. What was shocking in 1973 is no big deal.in 2018.

And when is a movie or video appealing primarily to purient interests rather than art or education? Hollywood and publishers have been pushing the limits ever since Miller. They will find the most vulgar true life story and then build a movie around it with as much salacious realism that can be packaged into it. Remember the teen magazine with the article promoting anal sex for both boys and girld? Dont be put off by the smell of feces, everyone has some feces in their rectum, its natural. Nary a protest! Except from us. But one can argue that it appealed to purient interests more than education because it completely left out the dangers of anal sex. So you can see the difficulties for a prosecutor.

Fortunately, obscenity laws for children operate within a totally.separate framework which is pretty simple and straight forward. The legal framework is couched in terms of child sex abuse rather than.obscenity. The laws vary slightly .from state to state. Typically the law prohibits any image of a real.child that features the genitalia and prohibits any image in which any part of a childs body comes into contact with the genitalia of another person whether an adult or not. Some states will add beastiality to the mix. But now the bugaboo.is proving it's a real image instead of a photo shopped creation. So who has the best forensic tools to do battle with this defense?

Cops and prosecutors dont have a crystal ball for divining an offense. They rely.on complaints from.victims or concerned citizens and they will have to prioritize the.offenses due to fiscal. and staff constraints and then they will have to go about proving the case.

The new frontier will entail Internet censorship and just how much an open and free society will tolerate restrictions. And that's a topic I'm not prepared to discuss.

Enigmatic_Continuum ago

Thanks for expanding on this topic.

Pizzalawyer ago

you are welcome. I dont know how to copy and paste so I cant provide citations or links. We all strayed off point re: Satanism. I dont believe there are any laws b/c we as a society have not yet recognized it as harmful. I need to do some research but I think India's new law providing for capital punishment for raping a child also included references to SRA. I'll get back with you later.

Enigmatic_Continuum ago

No worries! Thanks.