Obscenity Prosecutions under the Bush Administration

One of the DOJ missions under the Bush administration was to prosecute pornographers under obscenity law. However, a lot of the cases have not gone as planned. How Appealing links to one such story that provides some context as what has happened in the Bush DOJ:

n August 2003, the U.S. attorney's office in Pittsburgh made national headlines by filing obscenity charges against a California company that makes graphic pornography.

At the time, many saw the case against Extreme Associates as a prelude of things to come under then-Attorney General John Ashcroft.

But in the five years since, the case has languished. There had been no entries in the case docket since Aug. 17, 2007, until a reporter called the judge's chambers last week to inquire about the case. Early yesterday morning, the docket was updated to show that a telephone status conference will be held Sept. 17....

Some experts now say that's indicative of obscenity prosecutions as a whole across the country.

"For all the sound and fury, what we saw was a handful of prosecutions," said Reed Lee, an attorney who specializes in the First Amendment. "There never was a grand onslaught people may have envisioned."

The number of obscenity cases filed during the first term of the Bush administration did double over the last Clinton term, but that still meant there were just 125 filings from 2002 to 2006.

I'm guessing that regardless of who is President next, there will be a return to using obscenity law in rare, mostly child pornography cases.