A Pennsylvania woman has been sentenced to five years of probation, including six months of home detention, and forfeiture of her computer after pleading guilty Thursday to obscenity charges for running a Web site that featured text stories that were sexual and violent in nature.
Karen Fletcher, 56,of Donora, Pennsylvania, owned and operated the Web site, Red Rose Stories, which featured stories describing sexual molestation and violence against children. Other stories included torture, rape and murder of children, and Fletcher sold memberships to her site, where members could get full stories, the U.S. Department of Justice said.
Fletcher, using the pen name Red Rose, wrote most of the stories herself, the DOJ said. Some of the stories were available as audio files, but the site didn't include photos, according to press reports.
Fletcher reportedly was abused as a child and started the site as a form of therapy, according to news reports.
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation ordered the site closed in late 2005. Some cons utional lawyers have questioned the prosecution of Fletcher, saying many pieces of popular literature have contained similar descriptions of abuse or murder.
Fletcher pleaded guilty Thursday in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania in Pittsburgh to six counts of using an interactive computer service to distribute obscene materials. She must serve the first six months of her probation under home detention and pay a US$1,000 fine, Judge Joy Flowers Conti ruled.
Mary Beth Buchanan, the U.S. attorney in the Western District of Pennsylvania, has filed obscenity charges against several defendants.
Buchanan "has gone on a rampage trying to stamp out expression that doesn't meet her standards of morality," Marc John Randazza, a law professor at the Barry University School of Law in Orlando, wrote on his blog.
Randazza, who teaches about free speech rights and other legal issues, acknowledges that the content of Red Rose Stories was shocking, but he suggested the U.S. Cons ution protects fictional stories. "If you believe in the Cons ution, and you believe in what this country means, you can NOT believe that any American should ever face prison for writing fiction -- no matter what the subject matter of that fiction might be," he wrote in a blog post.
Obscene material isn't protected by the First Amendment.
Whether the author's site contained obscene material is a different question (and one that would be decided without specific rules) and whether written fiction can actually be deemed to be obscene is another fair question, I think. But it would certainly appear that the federal judge in this case decided that those materials were in fact obscene and beyond the protection of the First Amendment.
That is where the free speech really starts to end. Promoting stuff like that by writing stories, she deserves what she is gettin, if not more.which featured stories describing sexual molestation and violence against children.
What a ing joke.Ms. Buchanan said that the rarity of obscenity prosecutions during the eight years of the Clinton administration meant that the pornography industry had come to believe that law enforcement had tacitly “agreed to an anything-goes approach.”
I think it should be thought of somewhat like shes encouraging adults to do this kind of crap, even if she has some longwinded disclaimer not to do this at home, we all know that didn't work at all for that show Jackass. Some perverts gonna get some ideas from one of her stories and act on them and then what? Sites that explicitly and intentionally advocate the harm of children with realistic based tones earn their adminstrators all the punishment coming to them.
So the 2 girls 1 cup promotion is below the mendoza line of where free speech should end?
I hate when people use the cons ution to retrofit one of them into applying to today.
When they came up with it, they probably didn't have in mind the protection to those who wanted to "write stories solely of rape and murder towards children for the world to see via the internet."
The same thing for dumb s out there that argue they wanted "everyone to have guns."
Shouldn't you hate it more when peoples own personal standards and beliefs become the new benchmark on when you can and can't throw out peoples rights?
To the rest of you jackasses - stop PMing me you ing losers. Never once did I say I agreed or disagreed with this lady. Never once did I say I advocate this . I posted it to read peoples thoughts not because I support the lady. You people are ing pathetic and clearly blind.
Isn't that what the entire cons ution is based around? What laws and rules are based on? Personal standards of the majority?
So you think they had no right to shut her down since she was working within the predetermined standard set by the cons ution? Perhaps I misunderstood you.
BTW, she had a whopping 28 members.
Nice use of resources.
Where is this in the article?
Its not but they and many other offensive sites have managed to continue doing their thing without issue. How can story telling be less offensive than a video of a couple of gals munching bark.
I don't think you can hold the same standard for so long.
Just like people change, life changes, places change, standards of morality change.
It's being able to understand that and to adjust with those changes.
The world they lived when they put that in isn't the same world we live in today. We have to be socially responsible for the time we live in now, not follow to heart something written by men who have been dead hundreds of years.
I think the big problem here is that nobody has any clue what is cons utionally "obscene" and what isn't. The Supreme Court basically has punted on the idea of giving a definition and has left that determination to the norms of the local community. But the local community in 2008 is very different than the local community that existed 30 years ago or so. What's kosher in San Francisco might be seen as obscene in suburban Pennsylvania. Had this woman maintained her website in a different community, she might very well have never faced any sort of prosecution. But, given the current state of free speech law, that doesn't mean that the First Amendment was violated by her prosecution in Pennsylvania.
An even bigger problem with cyber obscenity is that what might be perfectly legal to display in, say, Thailand or Uruguay or Morocco might be deemed to be completely obscene in every American community. If it's legal where it's posted, I'm not sure it can be prosecuted where it's viewed. For instance, I don't know where 2 girls, 1 cup (given what I've heard, it sounds like a perfect example) originated, but it could be that it originated in some foreign place and isn't actually housed anywhere within the United States. If that's the case, no American prosecutor would likely be able to go after what would appear to be obscene material; if I decided to have a showing of that beauty in my house and charged admission to a bunch of my deviant friends, I might be getting closer to a prosecutable offense. If I'm displaying it myself, don't get the protection of the obscene material being legal somewhere else.
You shouldn't focus on just the web.
Isn't it just as obscene to read about our soldiers shooting innocent women and children without provocation in a book like Generation Kill?
Then it really wouldn't matter because she was technically working within a much stricter more broad standard than todays free wheeling anything goes way.
Unless you're telling me that todays society should have a tighter moral ground.
Probably not if a bunch of richers intend to make money off it.
Jime Rose Circus?
Furthermore she's not displaying anything at a local venue.
she got ed as a child and is getting ed again...free speech the great misnomer of american society...
if anything, the law enforcement agencies just got 28 solid leads to add to their watch lists...
even more reason that they probably should have let the site stay up.
I don't see how anyone can defend the content of what she had..
Pretty easy to defend when they allow millions of others to pen, stage, film and post just as equally ruthless or worse acts via the internet, print, tv or any other media.
It's easy. Ever read the Bible?
Rape:
34:2 And when Shechem the son of Hamor the Hivite, prince of the country, saw her, he took her, and lay with her, and defiled her.
Premeditated Drunken Incest:
19:34 And it came to pass on the morrow, that the firstborn said unto the younger, Behold, I lay yesternight with my father: let us make him drink wine this night also; and go thou in, and lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father.
Also, death, destruction, murder, etc, etc.
Gee, I hope no one reads it and gets any ideas. Ban it.
It's just that.
Nobody's defending the content, they're defending her right to write the content.
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