Impeach and prosecute

J. Michael Sharman
Published: June 16, 2008

Last week, a mistrial was declared in the obscenity trial of a Hollywood filmmaker after the prosecutor brought up a “potential conflict of interest concerning the [trial] court [judge] having a sexually explicit Web site with similar material to what is on trial here.”  The trial involved the worst films of one of the nation’s worst pornographers.

As one journalist described it, Judge Alex Kozinski then came “under scrutiny and open mockery when it was discovered that some pretty intense sexually explicit material was on his own Web site. There were also film clips as well.”

The judge in question is one of the most powerful judges in America: Alex Kozinski is chief judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals for California and eight other Western states.

Even a general description of all the obscenity contained on Judge Kozinski’s Web site is not possible in a family-oriented news medium, but suffice to say, one would not want to read those descriptions during breakfast.

Judge Kozinski disabled his site after being asked about the images in a June 10 interview.

He admitted some images were “degrading, and just gross.” 

“Is it prurient? I don’t know what to tell you,” Kozinski told the Los Angeles Times. “I think it’s odd and interesting. It’s part of life.”
 
Kozinski said he had begun saving the sexually explicit materials years ago.

“People send me stuff like this all the time,” he said,  while also admitting he sent his sexually graphic materials to friends.

It is not as though Kozinski was unaware of the possibility that his pornographic tendencies would remain undetected.

A “New York Times” review of Kozinski’s book on privacy in the electronic age quoted him as saying, “The home computer has become a secret monitor of our daily activities,” he wrote. “Its contents can now be retrieved and used against us later if we are unlucky enough to become entangled, even peripherally, in a legal controversy.” 

The year after that review was written, federal court administrators installed a system that monitored the computers of all federal court workers and included Web filters to block porn from government computers.

Kozinski then marched into a government computer room in San Francisco and personally disabled the filters for one-third of the nation’s judicial circuits, which, of course, included his own.

Ralph Mecham, head of the Administrative Office, told the New York Times that Kozinski was “advocating his passionate views that judges are free, undetected, to download pornography and Napster music on government computers in federal court buildings on government time even though some of the downloading may constitute felonies.” Judge Kozinski, Mecham warned, had shown “great interest in keeping pornography available to judges.”

Kozinski now says his Web site is for his family’s private use: “I do believe federal judges should have some latitude to be human beings in their private life.”

But Judge Kozinski’s statements about his current misdeeds are almost certainly going to be compared with his own previous writings on judicial misconduct: “Our first duty as members of the Judicial Council is not to spare the feelings of judges accused of misconduct.

“It is to maintain public confidence in the judiciary by ensuring that substantial allegations of misconduct are dealt with forthrightly and appropriately.”

The appropriate and forthright manner for “we, the people” to deal with Kozinski’s misconduct is for each of us to write the presidential candidates as well as our senators and congressmen requesting them to call for Judge Kozinski’s prosecution and impeachment.

Their answers to us will perhaps be as revealing as Kozinski’s earlier response to the attempt to block porn from his courthouse computer.

J. Michael Sharman is an independent columnist who practices law in Culpeper. His column appears Tuesday in the Star-Exponent.