Iowa Man Faces 20 Years in Jail for COMIC BOOKS! It's a Crumb Nightmare Come True!

McCamy Taylor

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Sat Dec-13-08 03:03 AM
Original message

Iowa Man Faces 20 Years in Jail for COMIC BOOKS! It's a Crumb Nightmare Come True!

Read Comics! Go to Jail!

It's true! In one of the strangest tales of American Puritan Prosecutors Gone Wild since Oklahoma State District Court Judge Richard Freeman ruled that copies of the award winning film The Tin Drum had to be taken from libraries, video stores and even people's homes and destroyed because of one scene

http://bubbaworld.com/tin-drum-1.html

Iowa is trying to send a comic book collector to jail for 20 years, because he ordered some Japanese manga in the mail. Here is the story.

http://www.mangaupdates.com/news.html?id=437

Yes, you read that right. Here's the deal. Christopher Handley of Iowa, USA was arrested about half a year ago for buying manga. One day, he receives 7 volumes of manga from the post office because he ordered them from Japan. The authorities follow him home because they already investigated the volumes and deemed them "obscene" and "objectionable." He is arrested, and they confiscate his whole collection: DVDs, manga volumes, VHS tapes, computers, etc. And now he faces a trial and up to 20 years in prison. All for ordering manga.

Now, it's true that sources say that some of the manga in question are yaoi. Sure, he may have had some hentai in his vast collection. But that's not the point. He was just going to read them in private in his own home. He didn't commit some heinous crime and rape someone. The issue here is about freedom. Your personal freedom.

Here is a statement from the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. The fact that such a thing exists lets you know that the graphic fiction industry has had its share of censorship problems. However, I am not sure that I have ever heard of anyone being threatened with 20 years in prison for purchasing items that are commercially available.

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2008-10-10/iowa-collector-charged-for-allegedly-obscene-manga

CBLDF's United Defense Group team, led by Eric Chase, has successfully petitioned District Judge Gritzner to drop some of Handley's charges and rule parts of a controversial law unconstitutional. Handley was initially charged under the United States Code, which was amended by section 504 of the PROTECT Act to prohibit distribution or possession of "a visual depiction of any kind, including a drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting," that �

� �(1)(A) depicts a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; and

� �(B) is obscene; or

� '(2)(A) depicts an image that is, or appears to be, of a minor engaging in graphic bestiality, sadistic or masochistic abuse, or sexual intercourse, including genital-genital, oral-genital, anal-genital, or oral-anal, whether between persons of the same or opposite sex; and

� '(B) lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value;

Gritzner ruled that the last two clauses were unconstitutional as they restricted protected speech. Handley still faces charges under the obscenity clause, if the court determines that the material meets the Supreme Court's Miller Test. The Miller Test dictates that material is only obscene if a jury determines that it meets all of the following three criteria:

* whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest
* whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law
* whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value

CBLDF Executive Director Charles Brownstein notes, "In the past, CBLDF has had to defend the First Amendment rights of retailers and artists, but never before have we experienced the Federal Government attempting to strip a citizen of his freedom because he owned comic books."

That old "community standard" test is a pesky one. Get together a jury of repressed Baptists in some rural enclave where incest is considered better than mixed race marriage because Lot diddled his daughter, and you can get a conviction on anything. A Republican Federal Attorney who is looking to run for state office---say as Attorney General or for the Supreme Court or for Congress---could advance his career by staging a ridiculous prosecution like this, aimed at a private citizen who would not have access to the kind of legal defense team that comic book stores and comic book artists would be able to command. This would be the easiest way to establish a precedent that could then be used to target millions of American consumers. With the vast warrantless wiretap operation that the Bush administration has run, they may already have information on everyone who has ever viewed web comics or manga online. And what better way to justify internet censorship than being able to show that millions of American internet users are "felons"?

Here is more on Handley's case in Wired .

http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008/11/neil-gaiman-com.html

Wired.com: How did Handley get wrapped up in this?

Brownstein: His case began in May 2006 when he received an express mail package from Japan that contained seven Japanese comic books. That package was intercepted by the Postal Inspector, who secured a search warrant after deciding the package contained objectionable content. When he picked up the package, Handley was pulled over by law enforcement officers who followed him to his home.

Once there, agents from the Postal Inspector's office, Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation and officers from the Glenwood Police Department seized Handley's extensive collection of over 1,200 manga publications; hundreds of DVDs, VHS tapes, laser discs; seven computers, and other documents. Though Handley's collection of hundreds of comics covered a wide spectrum of manga, the government is prosecuting drawings appearing in less than a dozen books.

Wired.com: That seems like a waste of taxpayers' time and money.

Brownstein: Handley's case is troubling because the government is prosecuting a private collector for possession of art.

If Handley has a collection of comics and manga that vast and only has a dozen pages with sexual content, then his collection is pretty tame by modern standards. What are the feds and local law enforcement doing? Trying to protect a grown man from erotic material by sending him to prison for 20 years at who knows how many hundreds of thousands of dollars to the tax payer? If there are no criminals and terrorists in Southern Iowa, maybe they should move these federal attorneys somewhere else.

More on the Protect Act of 2003 here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROTECT_Act_of_2003

Note that as the act was written it can even be illegal to draw adults engaged in sex if the artist does not make them look old and gnarly enough. In other words, Congress made aesthetics a federal crime. This can be a real problem when American postal workers who do not understand Japanese style open other people's mail at the post office and read the manga that someone ordered from Japan.

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2008-11-24/lawyer-indicates-manga-in-iowa-obscenity-case-are-yaoi

Chase told the Splash Page, "There is explicit sex in yaoi comics. And the men are drawn in a very androgynous style, which has the effect of making them look really young. There's a real taboo in Japan about showing pubic hair, so they're all drawn without it, which also makes them look young. So what concerned the authorities were the depictions of children in explicit sexual situations that they believed to be obscene. But there are no actual children. It was all very crude images from a comic book."

This is analogous to police seeing white powder, arresting someone for possession of white powder, declaring that it looked like cocaine but never bothering to test it and showing it to the jury---all so that they can convince the public that they are cleaning up corruption.

If anyone knows who is prosecuting this case, I would love to hear a name and see a picture. Only a total idiot would go to all this time and effort to prosecute a guy for comic book possession, and he should be on Obama's must fire list.