Especially for Parents
News and Commentary by Sharon Secor
July 2003
Pornography - Law Enforcement and The Ivory Tower Syndrome
One of the primary obstacles that we, as a society, face in our efforts to protect our children and families from pornography is the lack of meaningful enforcement of the laws and statutes that are already in place. In particular, with obscenity and indecency laws, many in positions of authority refuse altogether to enforce these constitutional laws. In refusing to enforce, they demonstrate a lack of respect for our community standards, as well as a lack of respect for the safety of our families and a startling lack of concern for the true victims of pornography. But even when laws against pornography are enforced, some in our legal system still appear more sympathetic towards the perpetrators than the victims, even when the victims are children.
"I enjoyed what I was doing. I didn't want to stop. I didn't want help," said former New York Law School professor Edward Samuels, according to an article written by Andrea Peyser, published in the June 24, 2003, edition of the New York Post.
Samuels made these comments after being caught with what has been widely reported as one of the most vile and extensive collections of child pornography ever encountered by the Manhattan District Attorney's office. According to Peyser, during the trial, prosecutor Maxine Rosenthal provided details of the roughly "150,000 shots, from stills of naked, undeveloped girls to videos of rape, whippings and even bestiality, committed upon children as young as 3."
In the same edition of the New York Post, Laura Italiano also reported on Rosenthal's description of the materials. In addition to the "nauseating images involving babies and dogs," Rosenthal described horrific scenes in which little girls were "crying and grimacing in pain." Samuels, a married father of two children, also possessed an assortment of whips and restraints. In her prosecution of this man, Rosenthal asked for the woefully inadequate maximum sentence possible within the plea bargain arrangement that Samuels's defense attorney, Avraham Moskowitz, successfully brokered.
However, despite the reportedly shocking depravity of his collection of images depicting the unspeakable suffering of innocents, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Brenda Soloff found the four years in prison that Rosenthal asked for to be far too harsh. In fact, according to Italiano, "the judge admitted she struggled over whether to send Samuels to jail at all." And, out of her great inner struggle came the sentence - six months in jail and 10 years probation.
On June 24, 2003, NY Newsday staff writer Karen Freifeld quoted the judge as saying that Samuels presented "a strong case he has suffered enough."
Judge Soloff was not alone in her concerns about Samuels. In the June 23, 2003, edition of New York Magazine, Elisabeth Franck reported that the dean of New York Law School, Richard Matasar, wrote in an e-mail to colleagues that "the Law School has placed Professor Samuels on paid administrative leave so that he may attend to his defense… Our hearts go out to Ed and his family as they face the difficult time ahead." Matasar acknowledged that he wrestled with the subject. "When there's no purchase or sale of these materials, I don't know...As a lawyer, I am ambivalent on these issues," he said, according to Franck.
Randolf Jonakait, one of many of the school's professors who were unhappy with the dean's decision to go to the district attorney with the information, reportedly said, "The notion of going to the police and not talking to Ed seems to me incorrect; it was wrong from a workplace point of view and wrong from an academic freedom point of view. Anyone who's concerned with issues of academic freedom should be concerned about this." Franck indicated that Jonakait was also one of several professors that "challenged the validity of the law Samuels was accused of breaking." "This is close to a victimless crime," Jonakait reportedly said.
Like so many other parents, I gratefully spend each day in the intimate, loving care of my tiny girls. And, as I struggle to understand these people, these well-educated and successful people, I look at my almost-four-year-old daughter, all sunshine and innocence. She shines with the knowledge that she is loved, that her world and the people in it are good.
As I think about all of this, the depravity of those images fills my mind. The dog. Tiny girls tied up. Babies. Beatings. Red welts. For a fraction of a horrible moment I am able to envision how my own daughter's face would look, innocence extinguished, fear and pain deadening the sunlight of her eyes. I taste my tears, my heartaches for those children, and no, I can't say that I concern myself greatly about the possibility of Samuels suffering too much.
Perhaps, therein lies part of the answer. I (and most others) live in the real world. We don't look down upon such situations from the ivory tower of academia or from a courtroom bench. In her article for New York Magazine, Franck described what seems to be a similar division of thought that she encountered at the law school.
She describes the people employed by the school with two terms, using "faculty" as referring to the professors and the word "staff" to refer to the secretaries, security guards, janitors, etc. - the people who live in the real world. The staffers, as a group, were horrified by the crime.
"However," Franck wrote of the faculty and senior administrative officials, they "were much more conflicted. To expect that they would shun an alleged child-pornography addict would be to underestimate the propensity to agonize in academia. Especially legal academia. And especially when you factor in the deep ambivalence among legal scholars about pornography."
As Franck explained it, if the staff could to be said to have "responded viscerally to the content of the material", then "some professors reacted almost as viscerally to the constitutional issues it provoked-the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech and the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of privacy rights." Or, as one professor quoted in Franck's article said, New York Law School's response demonstrated "just how abstracted faculty can be from the real world."
It is within legal institutions like New York Law School and with these legal perspectives that those who are charged with the responsibility of interpreting and enforcing our laws are trained. From these schools of thought come all of our lawyers and judges and many of our legislators.
And, while so many of these people deal in abstractions and legal theories, shaping social policies from the ivory tower, from the distance of the bench, we in the real world live with the results. This is seen in countless situations throughout our nation, with recent struggles over the use of porn filters in public libraries being a useful example. While the American Library Association and administrators of libraries were championing their own views about the First Amendment, librarians and patrons had to deal with the reality of the situation - men using public computers to access porn and masturbating in view of employees and patrons of all ages.
In his dissent in the June 2003 Supreme Court case invalidating sodomy laws, Lawrence v. Texas, Justice Scalia said that a majority of the Court had "taken sides" in the "cultural war" in support of those who work feverishly to dismantle our nation's Judeo-Christian underpinnings. The Samuels case demonstrates the cultural and philosophical roots of such clashes, how they ferment in our universities and bubble up through the judicial system.