Judge Kozinski is an appellate judge on the Ninth Circuit but is sitting to judge a trial case. This case is an obscenity prosecution and has already gathered some news coverage since the jurors will be forced to watch around eight hours of hard-core pornography to see if it's illegal under the Supreme Court's convoluted standards on obscenity. This is really extreme pornography too — bestiality and such.
So Kozinski is judging it, which was news to begin with. How often does an appellate judge sit for a trial? But Judge Kozinski is also famous for his dispute over whether judges could download pornography in the privacy of their chambers back in the early 90s.
Imagine the twist when on Wednesday, June 11, 2008, Judge Kozinski's personal website was found to have uploaded pornographic images, though nothing rising to the level of obscene. Still, they featured women on their hands and knees painted like cows, among others.
This poses a problem for the prosecution. Should the judge be asked to recuse himself? After all, if the judge is very likely to favor the defendants, isn't that a conflict of interests?
However, Judge Kozinski has come out and said the images on the home computer that were available for everyone to see were in reality uploaded by one of his sons, since it was a family computer. The judge claims to have had no knowledge of the images. If true, it will certainly put a different spin on things.
Still, this entire story is much juicier than most cases. A bit of advice: don't load porn on your personal computers, judges!
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