Not guilty verdict in DVD obscenity trial
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I had not heard anything about this until I spotted it trending on twitter earlier today (complete with some quite inventive fisting puns). Even then, full details of what it was all about were hard to find. Here's the bbc's eventual report on it, with the explicit details missing:-
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A male escort accused of distributing obscene DVDs has been found not guilty by a jury at Southwark Crown Court. Michael Peacock, 53, was charged with six counts under the Obscene Publications Act after an undercover police officer bought DVDs from him. The films, which he had advertised for sale online, featured hardcore gay sex acts.Mr Peacock's lawyer claimed the unanimous verdict might make police reluctant to prosecute in future. Mr Peacock, of Finsbury Park, north London, whom his lawyer described as a well-known member of the gay community, was charged after police sent an undercover officer to his house in January 2009 to buy the DVDs. Nigel Richardson, a lawyer with defence solicitors Hodge Jones and Allen, told the BBC: "Police were looking very closely at this case."
The jury had to decide if the DVDs would deprave and corrupt any person likely to read, see or hear it. Mr Richardson said that the jury decided the people likely to see the films were "gay men specifically asking for this type of material." He added: "The whole idea of something being depraved or corrupt is out-dated." The jury of men and women watched "large amounts [of the films over] several hours" during the trial, which began on Tuesday.
"Although they were quite shocked initially, they started to look quite bored very quickly," Mr Richardson said. The acts depicted in the films are not in themselves illegal. Mr Richardson's colleague Myles Jackman tweeted after the case that officers from SCD9, the Metropolitan Police unit dealing with human exploitation and organised crime, will "sit down with" the Crown Prosecution Service and the British Board of Film Classification "to review guidelines on obscenity".
Mr Jackman, writing at the start of the case, had said it was the "most significant in a decade". "This could be the final nail in the coffin for the Obscene Publications Act in the digital age because the jury's verdict shows that normal people view consensual adult pornography as a part of everyday life and are no longer shocked, depraved or corrupted by it," he said.
Mediawatch-UK, which campaigns against obscene material in the media, said the Obscene Publications Act needed to be tightened up. Its director Vivienne Pattison says the case "illustrates the problem" with the act. There is not a list which says what is obscene and what is not. It makes it incredibly difficult to get a conviction on that," she said. "As a society we are moving to a place where porn is considered as kind of fun between consenting adults, but porn is damaging.
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Here is a link to a blog from the law firm who represented the defendent, it gives a detailed background to the case hxxp://obscenitylawyer.blogspot.com/2012/01/obscenity-trial-of-decade.html
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:cheers: For a jury with some common sense :cheers:
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Sadly, such cases are just another way for the legal system to try and flex its arm… It's kind of depressing that such a thing would be something that one would get charged for, seeing as how there are how many pornographic films distributed throughout the world on a daily basis, yet there are only very few that have any such legal recourse to them. It really makes you wonder if some of these laws were really put into place for the purpose of trying to exploit and ruin people.
At least the jury had enough common sense to realize that porn is what it is. There's nothing "obscene" about it, nor is there anything "corrupt" about it. It's just a fact of life.
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A few people commented on Twitter at the time, they were amazed that anyone still watched porn on dvds.
It's astonishing that public money was wasted on investigating and prosecuting this. I would love to know the thought process of the individuals responsible for it going to trial, and why no one thought this would be a bad idea.
