It’s rare that we get an obscenity conviction in the American legal systems these days. Compared to the early 20th century, people are far less likely to find content “obscene.” One porn director, however, was found on the wrong side of the law when he produced a number of films with titles like Mako’s First Time Scat, Gang Bang Horse and Hollywood Scat Amateurs.
The FBI announced today that Ira Isaacs has been sentenced to 48 months in prison “for engaging in the business of producing and selling obscene videos and distributing obscene videos.” Alongside the prison sentence, Isaacs was also sentenced to three years of supervised released and ordered to pay a $10,000 fine.
Evidence presented at trial established that beginning in or about 1999 and continuing until at least 2011, Isaacs, doing business under the name LA. Media, operated numerous websites, through which he advertised and sold obscene videos that he acquired from other people. The obscene videos included a video approximately two hours in length of a female engaging in sex acts involving human bodily waste and a video one hour and 37 minutes in length of a female engaged in sex acts with animals. The evidence presented at trial also established that in approximately 2004, Isaacs began operating under the name Stolen Car Films and made obscene videos in which he instructed women to engage in sexual activity involving human bodily waste.
As is the case with all obscenity trials, the poor jurors had to sit through Isaac’s films to determine if they had any artistic value whatsoever. Then they had to apply a three-step test that was first laid out by at the time Chief Justice Warren Burger in 1973’s Miller v. California:
The basic guidelines for the trier of fact must be: (a) whether ‘the average person, applying contemporary community standards would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
If Isaacs could prove that his films fell under one of these three exemptions, he would be found innocent. The jury obviously felt that his films lacked any kind of artistic value, and the obscenity conviction was upheld.
It’s increasingly rare to see convictions for obscenity in our nation. I’ll leave what that means for the moral fiber of our citizens up to you. That being said, you probably shouldn’t start a career in directing scat porn anytime soon.
[h/t: LA Weekly]