Remember Karen Fletcher? The woman in the centre of the high-profile obscenity case I wrote about earlier? The reclusive lady who wrote violent sexual stories involving children in an attempt to cope with her own history of child abuse and was subsequently hounded by federal prosecuters? Well, the matter’s come to an end.
She battled the federal government’s allegations for more than a year and a half, but in the end, Karen Fletcher’s mental health will win out over her principles. And First Amendment lawyers will lose a key chance to have a court determine whether text-only material can be considered obscene.
Ms. Fletcher has decided to plead guilty to six counts of distributing obscenity online stemming from fictional stories published on a members-only Web site.
First Amendment lawyers thought an acquittal in the case could have begun a trend — proving that text-only cases do not rise to the level of obscenity standards.
The Donora woman was charged in September 2006 based on her “Red Rose” Web site, where Ms. Fletcher, 56, and others posted fictional stories that depicted the rape and torture of children — including infants.
She and her high-profile First Amendment lawyers claimed that what she’d written was not obscene, and they hoped to prevail before a jury.
In their favor, they thought, was the fact that the federal government has never won a conviction based solely on text under current obscenity law.
But Ms. Fletcher, who has agoraphobia — a fear of public places — is not capable of sitting through what likely would be a weeklong trial, said one of her attorneys, Lawrence Walters.
“With a different client, with somebody who had the strength to fight, there might have been a different outcome,” Mr. Walters said. “While we’d like her to be a standard-bearer on First Amendment issues, this is not the person to endure a trial.
“Even worse, should she be convicted, I don’t know that she’d be able to withstand a jail sentence.”
…
Under the proposed plea agreement, Ms. Fletcher would avoid prison and be sentenced to a term of home detention.
When I wrote about this matter several months ago, I noted that this case would a key test for the greatest American law of all — the first amendment. I ended that post with the words:
It is possible that Karen Fletcher will not be convicted. If she is, God save us all.
I don’t blame Karen Fletcher for the decision she has taken. A trial is a painful affair and I cannot even imagine how traumatic it may be to some one who suffers from agoraphobia, as Fletcher does. Nevertheless, today feels like an anti-climax. A defeat would have been catastrophic, signalling the slow destruction of something precious and irreplaceable; a victory would have reaffirmed the protection enjoyed by free speech in this country. This, being neither, leaves things in the balance, for another day, another case, another hero.
jesus h. christ on a raft!
what next…thought crimes?
i can’t believe a judge actually belives that words cause people to commit these crimes! as an american artist ,sexual abuse survivor and former sexworker i am disgusted that in order to supossively”"protect” children …this individual womans’(who is a sexual abuse survivor herself!) life means absolutly NOTHING to the powers that be! this is a democracy???my ancestors had a better time in the russian gulog!
Don’t be surprised if you blog eventually gets suppressed for this
I doubt they will pick on me. They seem to prefer targets like Fletcher, who are unlikely to fight back.
I’m glad I’m an old fart with not that many more years to live. But, I have pity on my children and grandchildren. I just wish that I could understand what our current government is all about. Talk about bungholes and freaks; both halls of Congress, the Supreme Court and the White House are full of them. The biggest problem is that none can distinguish between a crime and a vice (sin in the case of rightest religious freaks).
Lets get rid of all the messianic evangelists in our government before we all go down the lou.
“The biggest problem is that none can distinguish between a crime and a vice”
That’s exactly right Ben Trovato, and this failure to draw a line between the legal and the moral is the reason why so many of our civil liberties are at stake. In the interest of fairness, I should add that both the left and the right are guilty of it, though in different ways.
I was amazed to read about Fletcher and her ’surrender’ to the ‘law.’ In this day and age, when full frontal screwing is available to all during prime time TV. I hate the Bush Gestapo and their right wing toadies (they call it religion) and I’m always happy to blame everything on these water heads.
I was also amazed to read that it’s been 30 years since obscene materials were prosecuted by the Fed snoops.
Especially so, as in 1969 I went to federal court in Houston TX over just this kind of idiocy. I appeared as a witness for one of the porn publishers. Four of my ‘porn’ novels — among others — were in contention. Would you believe, a Federal judge and the jury sat in court for a week, the jurors forced to read all these books page by page. Talk about stupid!
Under the tutelage of the brilliant civil liberties lawyer, Stanley Fleischman, we hung the jury and won an aquittal. The pricedures and lead up to the trial were ludicrous to the extreme. The judge himself publicly concluded that this case should never have been prosecuted in the first place, and that further obscenity trials would be a waste of government monies.
But the feds and the FBI kept at it for some years after until it became totally laughable.
When was our government ever shy about wasting taxpayer monies?
That happened almost 40 years ago.
How time flies!
I understand that we are all about liberties here. But where do we draw the line? All do not agree that pornography and violence on tv are suitable to view. Sure if we don’t like it we don’t have to watch, we can just not buy the book. But the things that go in- do come out and many people do not have a standard to live up to anymore. If we put these things out there for the willing to view and they are weak minded, then we are just as responsible for their actions as they are. We have to protect those who are weak. Or else become a victim to the things that they do as a result. The whole point of this debacle was to try to set a standard of right and wrong, but this country of freedom doesn’t want any. Who protects the children?
I’m so tired of seeing the “protect the children” argument. If parents were actually did their job and, oh… I don’t know, were parents with regards to what their children did and where they went on the Internet and television, the “protect the children” idiocy argument wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. If you can pop them out, you can be responsible for them too. I didn’t have your kids; therefore I am neither legally nor morally obligated to watch out for your spawn. You are.
Anyhow, this isn’t about children because it never was. It was about the squashing of civil liberties protected by the 1st Amendment. Her stories had no pictures and they were her form of self-expression. While her choice of topic of vilely repugnant, it was her right as an American citizen to write the stories and make them public, albeit under subscription. Miller vs. California didn’t cover literature. While times have changed because the Internet is everywhere, this doesn’t stop federal prosecutors from going hog wild and prosecuting from anywhere because well, the Internet is accessible from anywhere in the world.
If you’re going to go that far why not go further? What about movies like Silence of the Lambs, Children of the Corn, A Clockwork Orange, and so on. If you’re going to accuse the writer of giving ‘weak-minded people’ the idea, what about the people who create the movies? Is it more acceptable because of the medium? At some point you have to be accountable for your own actions, not pointing the finger at someone else because they gave you the idea. They didn’t hold a gun to your head and make you do the deed.