Word: ginzburgs
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...SENTENCING publisher Ralph Ginzburg to three years in prison February 17, a Federal court in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania effectively denied constitutional protection for the freedom of speech. Convicting Ginzburg of violating an 1872 law forbidding the mailing of obscene material, the court sent Ginzburg to a prison whose warden has described conditions as "badly overcrowded," and whose inmates are on strike to protest the onerous conditions...
...Ginzburg was originally convicted in 1963 when he dared to print a series of photographs depicting a nude black man and white woman embracing. He appealed his case for ten years, eventually taking it to the Supreme Court which ruled 5-4 that Ginzburg's magazine Eros "stimulated the reader." On the 17th Ginzburg exhausted his last appeal...
...vote of 5 to 4, it upheld Ginzburg's conviction. Speaking for the court, Justice William Brennan said that Ginzburg's products should not be considered out of context; his promotional efforts showed he was pandering to prurient interests. The mailed advertisements, said Brennan, "stimulated the reader" to look "for titillation, not for saving intellectual content...
Having exhausted his appeals and stays, Ginzburg prepared for jail by telling reporters and a television audience last week that he was being made a whipping boy for an inhibited society. Of his attempt to mail his magazines from Blue Ball, Pa., and Intercourse, Pa., cited by the courts as evidence of his pandering intent, Ginzburg said, "At the worst, it was a very bad joke. But to send a man to prison for a bad joke is hardly what the founding fathers envisioned as a free and robust press." New York University Law Professor Norman Dorsen, author of several...
...irony is that Eros and the other Ginzburg offerings of nine years ago now appear tame. Today they would be unlikely to attract either the law's wrath or the public's attention...