Judge Alex Kozinski

Old little jurk

An obscenity trial in the US has been suspended after the judge overseeing it acknowledged that his own website featured sexually explicit images.

Federal appeals court judge Alex Kozinski, 57, agreed to halt until Monday the trial of a businessman accused of distributing obscene videos.

Mr Kozinski said he was not aware the explicit photographs and videos on his website could be seen by the public.

Public access to his site has since been blocked.

Mr Kozinski is a high-ranking and highly respected judge, and is chief judge of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

‘Don’t remember’

Mr Kozinski granted a joint prosecution and defence motion to suspend the trial after prosecutors asked for time to explore a potential conflict of interest.

It came after Mr Kozinski admitted in an interview published on the Los Angeles Times website that he had posted the material and shared some of it with friends.

Earlier, jurors had spent hours watching videos of bestiality and extreme fetishes that were evidence in the trial of Ira Isaacs, a Los Angeles businessman.

Mr Kozinski told the newspaper that he thought most of the material on his website was “funny” but acknowledged some of it was inappropriate.

In an email to a legal news website, abovethelaw.com, Mr Kozinski said the site was for private family use and that he believed his son Yale was responsible for uploading “a bunch of” the material.

“Everyone in the family stores stuff there, and I had no idea what some of the stuff is or was,” he wrote.

“I sure don’t remember putting some of that stuff there,” he added.

A spokesman for California Senator Dianne Feinstein, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that if it was true, it was “unacceptable behaviour for a federal court judge”.

The new chief judge of the federal appeals court in San Francisco dabbles as a paintball warrior, computer gamer and scuba diver. A political conservative and free-speech libertarian, he led a successful campaign in 2001 to stop court officials in Washington, D.C., from monitoring the Internet use of federal judges and court employees.

On Wednesday, Judge Alex Kozinski was on the hot seat after the Los Angeles Times disclosed that a Web site of his contained numerous sexual photos and videos - showing nudity and bestiality - while he was preparing to preside over an obscenity trial in Los Angeles.

Kozinski has now blocked public access to the site. He told lawyers that he would consider any request they made to remove him from the case. After the first day of trial Wednesday, the case was put on hold until next week while the U.S. Justice Department decides whether to ask him to step down.

Kozinski said in an interview with The Chronicle on Wednesday that he hadn’t paid much attention to the content of the Web site and hadn’t known its existence would be disclosed when he began questioning prospective jurors earlier in the week.

‘Could have walked away’

“If I’d known while we were selecting a jury, I could have walked away,” he said.

Kozinski, 57, was appointed to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals by President Ronald Reagan in 1985. At the time, he was the nation’s youngest federal appellate judge. His first prominent opinion stamped him as a judicial maverick - a dissent arguing that a local athletic organization should have the right to call its contests the Gay Olympics. He rose through seniority to the position of chief judge on Dec. 1; the term runs seven years.

Kozinski is known for an offbeat writing style, scattering the titles of more than 200 movies in a ruling on a cinema antitrust case, and ending one opinion with the advice that “the parties should chill.”

When the U.S. Judicial Conference proposed in 2001 to operate software that would detect “inappropriate” computer use by court employees, including judges, Kozinski was the most vocal opponent. “To say - just because the computer is owned by your employer - that you have no private space in it is going in the wrong direction,” he said of the plan, which was soon abandoned.

“He is irreverent across the board,” said Vikram Amar, a UC Davis law professor. “He doesn’t take anything, including himself, too seriously.”

Questionable images

In its article Wednesday, the Times said Kozinski’s Web site contained material that included a video of a half-naked man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal and a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows, along with images of masturbation and contortionist sex.

Kozinski said he would delete some of the material, including the photo of the women as cows, which he called degrading.

He told The Chronicle that he and his family have had the Web site since 2002 and used it to store a variety of material, including family photos, articles and other pictures. Until recently, he said, he had believed it was a private site that outsiders could see only with his permission.

“I don’t pay much attention to what’s on there,” Kozinski said. “There’s lots of stuff I see (on the site) and I don’t remember. I haven’t gone through and looked at it. Some of it, I should have. … I had no intention of making these files public.”

He said one of his sons called him after the newspaper article appeared and told him he had uploaded some of the sexually explicit images.

“Judges have a private life,” Kozinski said. “We just need to be a little more careful to keep it private. Sometimes it’s hard to know where to draw the line.”

Random assignment

In the Los Angeles trial, Ira Isaacs is charged with selling videos showing sexual fetishes, including bestiality, that violate obscenity laws. Kozinski was randomly assigned to the case under a program that allows appeals court judges to preside over occasional trials.

Jean Rosenbluth, a law professor at the University of Southern California and a former federal prosecutor, said Kozinski should probably step down from the case if the prosecutor requests it.

“Justice is concerned not just with actual conflicts but with the appearance of impartiality,” Rosenbluth said.

Longtime court commentator Gerald Uelmen, a law professor at Santa Clara University, said the episode raises “a question of judgment” but doesn’t appear to be grounds for removal from the case. Amar had a similar assessment.

“There’s lots of stuff that’s embarrassing to each of us, that we wouldn’t want the public to know,” he said. “Maybe this was an indiscretion in judgment … but I don’t see how that bears on his fitness to handle cases that involve that kind of subject matter.”

He said it’s also likely to remind Kozinski that “as chief judge … what he does is going to be more public.”