Meese Outlines New War on Pornography

Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III announced Tuesday the opening of a Center for Obscenity Prosecution and the creation a task force of federal attorneys to lead a crackdown by federal, state and local authorities on the estimated $8-billion-a-year pornography industry.

In a speech to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, which adopted its own anti-pornography plan Tuesday, Meese said the Washington-based center will act as a national “resource bank” for obscenity and child pornography prosecution.

The center will have a six-member staff consisting of attorneys and others who will keep files on pornography laws and provide statistical and reference information to state and county agencies and the public. The center also will keep sample indictments, legal briefs and sentencing memorandums to assist in obscenity prosecutions.

Meese, in Los Angeles to receive a commendation from the supervisors, said the new center and strike force are part of a legislative and law enforcement program against “hard-core obscenity” developed after Meese’s controversial Commission on Pornography concluded last July that a link exists between pornography and sexual violence.

The Meese Commission found that obscenity was rarely prosecuted. There were no obscenity prosecutions during a 1984-85 survey in Manhattan or Los Angeles, “where the majority of obscene materials are now and were then being produced and distributed,” the report said.

With the crackdown, however, a primary responsibility of more than 100 federal attorneys will be pornography prosecution, Meese said, detailing a strategy he first outlined in October.

All 93 U.S. attorney’s offices will have a lawyer who specializes in such cases, while the new strike force will consist of six attorneys in Washington and others around the country, he said. Those lawyers will be assisted by existing organized crime strike forces, he said.

Federal prosecutors will focus on child pornography and on the interstate trafficking of printed and filmed materials that encourage sexual violence, especially to women, Meese said.

“A hideous new form of the slave trade has developed, one that has expanded along with the problem of missing children. . . . The commission found that child pornography involving very young children--infants even--is not unknown,” Meese said.

Prosecutors will coordinate their efforts with the National Center on Missing and Exploited Children to stop kidnaping and child abuse by pornographers, he said.

“Most (magazines) you see that are sold in stores . . . are not the things we will be prosecuting,” he said. “There will be no censorship and no interference in First Amendment freedoms.”

The Meese Commission sent letters to convenience stores last year that said it had received testimony characterizing Playboy and Penthouse as “porn” magazines. Many stores stopped selling the magazines.

The commission has been criticized by civil libertarians and some media executives, who have said its members favored censorship. But Meese told the Board of Supervisors that public sentiment supports his commission’s effort to shape a “safer, more decent society.”

In bills being drafted, the Justice Department will ask Congress for stiffer prison sentences for those repeatedly convicted of distributing pornography. Some repeated offenders should “never get out” of prison, he said at a press conference.

Other bills would authorize confiscation of illicit profits from pornography and restrict obscene cable television programming and “dial-a-porn” telephone messages, he said. Meese commended the supervisors for adopting anti-pornography recommendations by the county Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, which were based on the Meese Commission report.