Another prosecution/ruling re Thomases/Amateur Action

[Greg Broiles <gbroiles@netbox.com>]

List members may be familiar with the prosecution of Robert Thomas, a Bay
Area man who runs (ran?) a BBS entitled "Amateur Action", which provided,
via modem and mail order, pornographic images to its customers. 

Robert Thomas was arrested in California, then prosecuted in and imprisoned
by a federal district court in Tennessee based on Tennessee community
standards for the material he made available from California; apparently
that prosecution centered on one or more pictures involving sex between
human(s) and animals. 

Subsequently, he was indicted by a federal grand jury in Utah for
distribution of child pornography; he moved to dismiss that second
prosecution on the grounds of double jeopardy and collateral estoppel. His
motion was denied, and he subsequently plead guilty to a single count and
was sentenced to 26 months' imprisonment. He appealed the denial of his
motions to dismiss, and was unsuccessful; the Tenth Circuit ruled that the
constitution's protection against double jeopardy and the doctrine of
collateral estoppel were not applicable because the two prosecutions
involved two different charges (obscenity in TN and child porn in UT) and
different findings of fact.

He also requested that his sentence be reduced to end at the time his
sentence ends in for the TN prosecution, but his request was denied and the
appeals court declined to modify the trial court's sentence. 

The text of the appellate court's ruling is at

<http://www.ljx.com/cgi-bin/f_cat?prod/ljextra/data/external/1997/06/9706024
.c10>, I
have mirrored it at <http://www.parrhesia.com/thomas.txt>. 


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