We are all too aware of the 'fabled' 9th U.S. Court of Appeals found in San Francisco. This is the single most liberal-leaning court in the federal system and can be counted on for ground-breaking decisions that often run counter to the mainstream.
Now, we're being given the opportunity to make our own judgments about the chief judge of that court, a gentleman by the name of Alex Kozinski. By all accounts, the judge has had a storied career. He was appointed to the 9th Circuit by President Ronald Reagan and was considered as a possible Supreme Court nominee by then President George H.W. Bush in 1990 and 1991 according to an Associated Press story that ran in the morning Journal Sentinel.
How is it that we are now able to make personal judgments about the chief judge? Well, he was forced to suspend an obscenity trial that he was presiding over when sexually explicit material was discovered posted to his family's web site.
Certainly anything can happen on the Internet; things can be made to seem something that they are not. Slack needs to be cut for anyone in this respect. But, when they open their mouths to defend themselves, they may tend to open the flood gates.
Judge Kozinski said he didn't believe any of the images were obscene. (They were, by the way, reported to have been scenes of a man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal as reported in the article. A female painted as a cow was seen nude on all fours in another image according to the press.) That seems to be along the lines of what I think of as bestiality and pornography. He is quoted as saying, in response to the question of whether or not this was prurient, "Is it prurient? I don't know what to tell you. I think its odd and interesting. It's part of life."
The judge is computer savvy. He apparently builds his own computers, and has battled federal court administrators over Web filters they installed to block porn from government computers. He seems to know his way around a computer and the Internet.
He said he must have accidentally uploaded the images to his server while trying to upload something else.
He is, or was, presiding over a trial for a man accused of obscenity for selling movies depicting bestiality.
Several thoughts come to mind:
This court is notorious for its liberal bent, and this seems to bear out the sense that many of us have about that court. I view this court as an embarrassment but I understand that the ACLU would have a different take.
The press has written the story so as to tell us everything good about this judge while sort of lamenting that something like this could beset such a learned jurist. I submit that had this been a conservative justice, we would see the equivalent of the smear that we witnessed during the hearings to confirm Justice Clarence Thomas. This story would not have been buried in the innards of the morning paper; it would have, instead, been on the front pages in every newspaper and appear as the lead article on every newscast in the country for a week.
Will there be an investigation in this matter such as was conducted by the Cedarburg School Board? There ought to be at least that level of scrutiny brought in this instance.
Will people finally admit that the 9th Circuit is an embarrassment? A few of us will do so, but the majority just don't seem to see things the right way.
