Police violated federal law by getting a man's name from the video shop which rented him an Oscar-winning foreign film deemed pornographic in the Sooner State, a jury has ruled.
And it probably didn't hurt that the defendant is also a member of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Michael Camfield sued three Oklahoma City police officers who came to his house and asked him to turn over a copy of The Tin Drum two years ago. A state judge ruled then that the film was pornographic, but a federal court later overturned that ruling. The officers got Camfield's name from a list of people who'd rented the German film from a video store.
The Tin Drum recounts the rise and fall of the Nazis through the eyes of a child. It won the Academy Award as best foreign film for 1979, and contains scenes in which the central character is intimate sexually with a young woman.
A federal jury, though, has found the police violated the Federal Video Privacy Act when they obtained Camfield's name. But the jury also rejected Camfield's argument that the officers also violated the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable search and seizure. Camfield had testified he was scared into turning the tape over when police also told him he faced 20 years behind bars.
The Tin Drum became a pornography question in Oklahoma when a group called Oklahomans for Children and Families complained to the Oklahoma City District Attorney in 1997 that the film included scenes of child pornography. A state judge subsequently agreed, and the tape was pulled from public libraries and video stores.
But a federal judge later ruled the film not pornographic and that police violated privacy laws by tracing the names of those who rented it, according to Reuter's.
