Text-Only Obscenity Issue Won’t Be Litigated Due to Guilty Plea

A case that raises the issue of whether text alone can justify a federal obscenity charge won’t be decided by a court on First Amendment grounds.

Karen Fletcher, charged with distributing obscenity online, has decided to plead guilty, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports. She was accused of violating the law by posting fictional stories about the rape and torture of children on her members-only website.

Federal prosecutors have never won a conviction under current obscenity law based solely on written words without photos, the story says.

Fletcher’s lawyer, Lawrence Walters, told the Post-Gazette that his client has agoraphobia and is not capable of sitting through a long trial. “While we'd like her to be a standard-bearer on First Amendment issues, this is not the person to endure a trial,” he said.

Fletcher’s plea agreement calls for a sentence of home detention. She said her stories helped her deal with childhood sexual abuse.

A hat tip to How Appealing, which posted the Post-Gazette story. Blog author Howard Bashman wrote about the case in an October 2006 article.