Extreme Associates Petitions Supreme Court
By: Mark Kernes
From AVN
After months of preparation, the Petition for Writ of Certiorari of Extreme Associates, Rob Black and Lizzy Borden has been completed and is on its way to the clerk of the United States Supreme Court – the defendants’ last stop before either being absolved of all charges by the land’s highest court, or before their being forced to stand trial in U.S. District Court on several counts of trafficking obscenity.
The petition, authored by attorneys H. Louis Sirkin and Jennifer M. Kinsley, ask the Supremes to rule on three questions:
“1) Whether the federal obscenity statutes, as applied to the distribution of obscenity in private ares of the Internet, violate the individual right to privately access and view obscene materials?”
“2) Whether the Court’s previous determinations that the right to privately possess obscenity generates no corollary right to distribute obscenity are valid in light of the Court’s emerging understanding of privacy and the advent of the Internet?”
And,
“3) Whether Lawrence v. Texas … eliminates Congress’ ability to criminalize the distribution of obscenity in private areas of the Internet based solely upon concerns for public morality?”
The questions may sound simple, but they’ve all been a long time in coming. They began with U.S. District Judge Gary Lancaster’s excellent decision dismissing all charges against the defendants through a combination of Supreme Court rulings from Lawrence v. Texas, the case that overturned the 20-year-old Bowers v. Hardwick’s criminalization of consensual adult sodomy; the First Amendment’s freedom of speech clause; and the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of substantive due process privacy rights embodied in, among other decisions, Roe v. Wade and Griswold v. Connecticut.
That decision was overturned last December by a three-judge appeals court panel, which the entire Third Circuit then declined to review in an en banc proceeding, so the U.S. Supreme Court was the next stop.
AVN.com’s legal expert will be reviewing the petition in detail, so look for a full analysis on this site shortly.