Julie Hilden has this commentary on Findlaw. She writes:
Earlier this month, in Pittsburgh, U.S. District Judge Joy Flowers Conti sentenced a woman who says she is a sexual abuse survivor, Karen Fletcher, to home confinement for violating the federal obscenity laws. Fletcher’s alleged offense was maintaining a website on which she posted explicit stories about child abuse – stories she said were based upon her own abuse, and that served as a form of therapy for her. The site had 29 subscribers, each of whom paid a $10 subscription fee.
In this column, I’ll explain why I believe the First Amendment protected Fletcher’s conduct, and why I believe that the government has now chosen to turn, after a longstanding practice of non-prosecution, to prosecuting written material such as Fletcher’s.
