List members may be familiar with the prosecution of Robert Thomas, a Bay Area man who runs (ran?) a BBS entitled "Amateur Action", which provided, via modem and mail order, pornographic images to its customers. Robert Thomas was arrested in California, then prosecuted in and imprisoned by a federal district court in Tennessee based on Tennessee community standards for the material he made available from California; apparently that prosecution centered on one or more pictures involving sex between human(s) and animals. Subsequently, he was indicted by a federal grand jury in Utah for distribution of child pornography; he moved to dismiss that second prosecution on the grounds of double jeopardy and collateral estoppel. His motion was denied, and he subsequently plead guilty to a single count and was sentenced to 26 months' imprisonment. He appealed the denial of his motions to dismiss, and was unsuccessful; the Tenth Circuit ruled that the constitution's protection against double jeopardy and the doctrine of collateral estoppel were not applicable because the two prosecutions involved two different charges (obscenity in TN and child porn in UT) and different findings of fact. He also requested that his sentence be reduced to end at the time his sentence ends in for the TN prosecution, but his request was denied and the appeals court declined to modify the trial court's sentence. The text of the appellate court's ruling is at <http://www.ljx.com/cgi-bin/f_cat?prod/ljextra/data/external/1997/06/9706024 .c10>, I have mirrored it at <http://www.parrhesia.com/thomas.txt>. -- Greg Broiles | US crypto export control policy in a nutshell: gbroiles@netbox.com | http://www.io.com/~gbroiles | Export jobs, not crypto. |