A two-year-old obscenity indictment against Barnes & Noble Booksellers now awaits a judge's ruling on whether to dump the case or send it to a jury.
The Birmingham News reports attorneys for the bookstore chain asked Circuit Judge Richard Shashy in April to throw out the case, on grounds the two books of photographs of nude children cited in the indictment are serious works under Constitutional protection.
"These are not 'dirty pictures' of naked children but are rather candid photos that make a statement about human experience," said Montgomery attorney Bobby Segall in his April 19 motion. "The indictment places the nation's largest bookseller in criminal peril for selling books which have serious artistic or literary merit."
The News says a similar indictment against Barnes & Noble in another Alabama court was thrown out earlier this year. The books under the legal eye are by photographers Jock Sturges and David Hamilton.
Prosecutors argue Hamilton's book, Age of Innocence, is obscene because it features 16 images or scenes of genital nudity and over 100 photographs of female breast nudity of children, the paper says. Sturges's Radiant Identities is obscene, prosecutors say, because it depicts 21 scenes of genital nudity and 13 of breast nudity of underage children.
Under Alabama law, the standard to be applied is "contemporary local community standards," and the community is defined as the judicial circuit in which the books were sold. But Segall argues the Alabama law puts an "unreasonable burden" on interstate commerce, since Barnes & Nobles has stores throughout the United States.
