Christopher Handley Pleads Guilty to Obscenity Charges
The Chicago Tribune newspaper reports that Mr. Christopher Handley, an Iowa manga and anime fan who was arrested and charged with posession of obscene material, in this case, unspecified imported Japanese manga, in May 2006. Despite having two sections of charges against him dismissed as unconstitutional in 2008, Mr. Handley pleaded guilty to one charge of possessing obscene visual representations of the sexual abuse of children and one count of mailing obscene material. As part of the plea agreement, three other counts against him were dismissed.
Mr. Handely was not charged with receiving, possessing, and mailing obscenity, not child pornography.
39-year-old Handely has not been sentenced yet, but may face up to 15 years in prison and up to $500,000 in fines.
The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund Executive Director Charles Brownstein has said in response to the situation, “Naturally, we are very disappointed by this result, but understand that in a criminal case, every defendant must make the decision that they believe serves their best interest.” “Because the set of facts specific to this case were so unique, we hope that its importance as precedent will be minimal. However, we must also continue to be prepared for the possibility that other cases could arise in the future as a result.â€
The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF) spent $2400 on research to assist in Mr. Handely’s defense, and had allocated up to $15,000 for expert witness expenses. Donations to the CBLDF are gratefully accepted.
Source: Anime News Network & ICv2
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It’s nice to know that he could get a harsher prison sentence than an actual rapist.
Now how about we go after the companies who actually create this stuff and/or distribute it here in the States?
> Now how about we go after the companies who actually create this stuff and/or distribute it here in the States?
You mean like Equality Now? ^^
http://www.sankakucomplex.com/2009/05/12/equality-now-we-should-censor-other-countries/
Hayami: Maybe China had it right — _within it’s own borders_ — to fully censor what it didn’t like.
If I were to receive a piece of foreign child porno and have it over here, I could be busted _within our own borders_.
Maybe we _SHOULD_ censor other countries — in fact, if you think about it, that happens all the time in anime brought over here.
A couple of things:
(1) The big lie behind the law and the Handley case is that looking at cartoons causes sex crimes. There is NO study that even begins to suggest that it does. There are no studies that even show correlations between cartoons and crimes. (There are SOME studies that would suggest cartoons prevent sex crimes by correlating the general
availability of the material with sex crime statistics, but this is weak at best.) In some circumstances a cartoon might spur someone on to commit a sex crime, while in other circumstances it might prevent a person from
committing one (unless you consider self-masturbation a crime). In NO case, however, has it EVER been shown that a cartoon was either a necessary or sufficient CAUSE for a sex crime. The burden should be on the censors in Congress and the government, not to mention the boards of NGOs (or would-be censors who post blog comments), to prove harm. That they fantasize it is not enough.
(2) Handley got his magazines by mail-order (they weren’t necessarily lolicon – no one but Handley and the government knows what they are) and Dwight Whorley got his online from a site in Japan, but one need not look so far and wide to find this material. There are literally hundreds of blogs and download sites that offer the material on line. There are numerous blogs devoted to translating from Japanese to English and EVERY download service – deposit files, easy-share, badongo, rapidshare,
mega-upload, you name it – has lolicon in its inventory. Manga is published in Japan, but the popularity of it, including lolicon, is a world phenomenon. There are sites in the U.K., Spain, Argentina, Portugal, Russia, among other places, although the majority of sites are hosted in
the U.S. even if they’re ostensibly foreign sites. To find any of this material is as simple as typing “lolicon” in Google.
(3) There are many thousands of magazines devoted to lolicon, counting full-length manga and shorter doujinshi. And there are an uncountable number of representations in the huge monthly anthologies and manga and doujinshi with mixed content. Lolicon, along with huge breasts, schoolgirls, bdsm, and rape are the mainstays of manga, not some bizarre
kinks in it. Chances are that any serious collector of erotic manga is going to have lolicon images of one sort or another.
Handley was unlucky, of course, as was Dwight Whorley. (Whorley was also a bit stupid for using a computer in a state unemployment office.) But together these cases give enormous incentive to the government to go after anyone. If they do, it will be like shooting fish in a barrel.