Former Department of Justice prosecutor Bruce A. Taylor, one of the founding members of the National Obscenity Enforcement Unit (NOEU), has been rehired by the DOJ as, depending on which report one wants to believe, either "a senior counsel to the Assistant Attorney General based in Washington, D.C." or "to oversee the Department's pornography prosecution efforts."
The announcement was posted late Feb. 2 on the Family Research Council Website, and confirmed Feb. 3 by the Christian News Service.
"It's just strange to see him back in the saddle over there," remarked First Amendment attorney J. Michael Murray, who went head-to-head with Taylor in 1991 during the obscenity prosecution of porn entrepreneur Rueben Sturman. "It's de je vu all over again."
"We welcome Bruce Taylor to rejoin the debate on the extent of human liberty. I think he will find that things have changed since 1987," commented Chicago attorney J.D. Obenberger wryly, referencing the year of the NOEU's creation.
In what relation that puts Taylor to current Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS) head Andrew Oosterbaan is anybody's guess... but no one in the adult industry is likely to be happy about it.
"If Mr. Taylor is going to be in the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, working under Oosterbaan, the significance of his rehiring is relatively small," opined attorney Jeffrey Douglas, who also serves as board chairman of the Free Speech Coalition. "He is a committed opponent of free speech, of free thought and human sexuality as one normally thinks of it. But if he is working under a career guy, as Oosterbaan is, who does not appear to be an agenda guy, then there is a limitation to the reach and extent of his damage. If he is placed above Oosterbaan or replacing Oosterbaan, then his capacity for damage is all the greater."
"What it certainly does represent is yet another manifestation of the commitment that [Attorney General John] Ashcroft and his boss, acting President Bush, have to attack the industry. As has been said by me and many others for a long time, when you have this convergence of a political payoff and an ideological commitment, the risk is at its greatest, and Bush needs to galvanize the right wing. He has infuriated them over the current budget, and offering $120 million or whatever it is to teach people about marriage is not going to be enough - for one thing, it's unlikely to survive the budget debate - so an all-out attack on the industry will, of course, galvanize the right, and when you have people in the Justice Department who are operating under the assumption that they are God's agents on Earth, it's a very bad situation."
Veteran obscenity defender H. Louis Sirkin agreed with Douglas' assessment, but took issue with some of the claims made in the FRC announcement, which stated, "Mr. Taylor served as a senior trial attorney during the administration of President Bush's father. In that position he successfully prosecuted the world's top pornographer at the time, Reuben Sturman, as well as several other major distributors of illegal pornography. He has prosecuted more pornography cases than any other person in history."
"Oh, I'm not at all sure that Bruce has 'prosecuted more pornography cases than any other person in history'," Sirkin assessed. "And I'd certainly wonder how many convictions he's really gotten in the obscenity cases he has prosecuted."
I don't believe he was directly involved in the convictions on Reuben Sturman," Sirkin added. "The one who was responsible for convicting Reuben was Craig Morford, who was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Northern District of Ohio. Bruce was not one of the prosecutors on the case."
Morford was the prosecutor on Sturman's tax evasion case; the first time the government had managed to convict Sturman of anything. Sturman and attorney J. Michael Murray faced Taylor in a federal obscenity case in 1991, which Murray remembers well.
"What happened was, the case went to trial for almost three months, and the jury came back with a not-guilty verdict on one count, and it was a hung jury on all the other counts," Murray stated. "As I recall, the split on the jury was, there were more for acquittal than conviction, so Bruce Taylor tried that case on the other side of me and he got nothing out of it. What happened was, later on, rather than go through a retrial - and I think I negotiated this with Mary Speering, but Taylor might have been involved - at that juncture, Reuben had lost his tax case, and so we entered a plea in the obscenity case and got a concurrent sentence, which meant that he basically didn't do any punishment for that case."
Sirkin's main problem with Taylor's rehiring, however, runs deeper than lies and exaggerations in press releases.
"I'm concerned with the government hiring somebody to run a department or an office or branch of it who has been so highly committed to a particular philosophical position," Sirkin said. "Being a member of the Department of Justice, he's supposed to represent all the people, and he's coming from an environment of never having represented all the people; he's always represented a zealot group that has an agenda."
It's that lack of objectivity and the inability to look at a potential obscenity case dispassionately that troubles Sirkin most.
"I think he's going to be more inclined to be aggressive in prosecutions rather than being objective to the preservation of the First Amendment, and that does concern me," Sirkin noted. "He's never had any objective position from his very beginning days as an assistant city prosecutor in Cleveland throughout his career. He has followed, and he has followed very closely and has been aligned with people who have an absolute commitment... to being anti-sexually explicit material regardless of whether it's protected or not. And don't let it be overlooked that his career was really molded by Charles Keating's group, once it moved to Arizona."
Keating, it will be recalled, was the founder of Citizens for Decency through Law (formerly Citizens for Decent Literature, also initialed as "CDL"), which began in Ohio and later was headquartered in Arizona at a time when Taylor was Assistant Attorney General for the state. Keating was also the principal of Lincoln Savings & Loan, and in the 1980s was convicted of bilking hundreds of depositors out of their life savings in an investment fraud scheme.
Sirkin described Taylor as a "bigwig" in Keating's CDL organization, and one of Keating's top legal advisors.
"He's been a paid professional to wipe out sexually explicit material. That's been his entire career," Sirkin stated. "He's entitled to his opinion, but not as a government representative. He's unwilling to look at the other side."
AVN.com will be following this story closely over the next several months, as the Justice Department clearly gears up for increased prosecutions of the adult industry.
