But his beliefs that, "it is possible to deprave even a woman," were not exactly educative.
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As tempting as it is to salute Andrew's chipper girlfriend, Monica, for calling her cranberry-and-popcorn Christmas tree decorations "popcornaments," the real winner of this week's Portmanteau Prize has to go to Selina, for dubbing the would-be woodsman Kent "Deprave-y Crockett."
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They also rejected the doctrine of original sin."The fall of Adam, as it was but one act, could not have power to deprave his own nature, much less that of his posterity." The Racovian Catechism (English trans. Thomas Rees, London 1818), p. 326.
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The theme itself should not be forbidden, and the book's treatment of its theme was unexceptionable.Souhami, 226–227. In his judgement, issued on 16 November,Miller, p. 189 Biron applied the Hicklin test of obscenity: a work was obscene if it tended to "deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences".
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Since 1857, a series of obscenity laws known as the Obscene Publications Acts have governed what can be published in England and Wales. The classic definition of criminal obscenity is if it "tends to deprave and corrupt," stated in 1868 by Lord Justice Cockburn, in Regina v. Hicklin, now known as the Hicklin test.
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After Vince successfully collects the ingredients and wins a swamp boat race, Crawdad Jimmy reveals that he was just buying time for Kosmo, who unleashes a hurricane named Hurricane Hannah to destroy Vince. Using some fans and a windmill, Vince manages to defeat the hurricane and makes his way to the Carnival DePrave. In the Carnival DePrave, Vince has to face down some more challenges Kosmo has set up for him, including an “obligatory evil twin” to activate the carnival's rides to reach a runway with a motorcycle that Vince can use to jump into the Big Top, where Madam Charmaine is being held. Upon entering the Big Top, Vince finds that Kosmo is piloting a massive robot, called the "Kosmobot", which he then tries to use to crush Vince.
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Vince uses the model railroad to hurt himself, thus destroying Dolly. Afterward, he finds a passageway leading out of the Manor. At the end of the passageway is the Bayou, home to a "colorful local character" named Crawdad Jimmy. Crawdad Jimmy also offers to take Vince to the Carnival DePrave but asks him to collect some ingredients for his gumbo (onion, sausage, crawfish).
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He said that it was not the specialist but for the judiciary to judge whether something was obscene in writing or not. In the written copy of the verdict he mentions Hicklin- 1 ...whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscene is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.
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Since the Court's decision in Roth v. United States, the Court had struggled to define what constituted constitutionally unprotected obscene material. Under the Comstock laws that prevailed before Roth, articulated most famously in the 1868 English case Regina v. Hicklin, any material that tended to "deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences" was deemed "obscene" and could be banned on that basis.
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Lord Scarman was of the opinion that blasphemy laws should cover all religions and not just Christianity and sought strict liability for those who "cause grave offence to the religious feelings of some of their fellow citizens or are such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely to read them".R v Lemon [1979] AC 617, 664 The appeal was lost.
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The Hicklin test is a legal test for obscenity established by the English case Regina v. Hicklin. At issue was the statutory interpretation of the word "obscene" in the Obscene Publications Act 1857, which authorized the destruction of obscene books. The court held that all material tending "to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences" was obscene, regardless of its artistic or literary merit.
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He believed he had made an important scientific discovery that the human race had been living in error. In 1911, Chidley published The Answer in Melbourne. The authorities attempted to prevent distribution by prosecuting booksellers and Chidley on the grounds that the pamphlet contained material "which would tend to deprave and corrupt the morals of any person reading it." Chidley sold copies to curious passers-by on the footpath.
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The Hicklin test is a legal test for obscenity established by the English case Regina v. Hicklin (1868). At issue was the statutory interpretation of the word "obscene" in the Obscene Publications Act 1857, which authorized the destruction of obscene books. The court held that all material tending "to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences" was obscene, regardless of its artistic or literary merit.
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The book details the history of struggles against literary censorship, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States of America. As the narrative develops, it turns increasingly to US First Amendment law. It tells the stories of various censorship struggles and cases throughout the twentieth century. The book is dedicated to Justice William Brennan.Henry Louis Gates, "Book Review: To 'Deprave and Corrupt': Girls Lean Back Everywhere", 38 N.Y.L. Sch.
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However, the published bill made no reference to the "deprave and corrupt" test. In October 2014, Robul Hoque was convicted of possessing up to 400 explicit manga images involving fictional children, in the UK's first prosecution of its kind. He received a 9-month suspended sentence. He was also warned in court that had he been in possession of actual child pornography, he would have been sentenced to jail for a longer term in years.
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578 and in 1966 against the British artist Stass Paraskos for an exhibition of his paintings held that year in the northern English city of Leeds.Norbert Lynton, Stass Paraskos (Mitcham: Orage Press, 2003) 7f Parts of the Act were repealed shortly after the Paraskos trial and it has rarely been used since in relation to visual art. The Obscene Publications act is notoriously vague, defining obscenity as material likely to "deprave and corrupt".
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By permitting the publication of Fanny Hill, the U.S. Supreme Court set the bar for any ban so high that Rembar himself called the 1966 decision "the end of obscenity". Only books primarily appealing to "prurient interest" could be banned. In a famous phrase, the court said that obscenity is "utterly without redeeming social importance"—meaning that, conversely, a work with any redeeming social importance or literary merit was arguably not obscene, even if it contained isolated passages that could "deprave and corrupt" some readers.
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Eventually, the customs department of the time stopped consulting this committee entirely. In 1960 the novel Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov was banned by the Supreme Court under this act. This decision was made based on an interpretation of the clause "unduly emphasizing matters of sex" as meaning "dealing with matters of sex in a manner which offends against the standards of the community in which the article is published". Eventually, the book was judged to be indecent on the basis that it "would have a tendency to corrupt or deprave a class of readers not negligible in number", despite its literary merit.
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Historians have explored the role of pornography in social history and the history of morality.Judith Ann Giesberg, Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of American Morality (U of North Carolina Press, 2017). The Victorian attitude that pornography was for a select few can be seen in the wording of the Hicklin test stemming from a court case in 1868 where it asks, "whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences." Although they were suppressed, depictions of erotic imagery were common throughout history.
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The authorities appealed Hicklin's reversal, bringing the case to the consideration of the Court of Queen's Bench. Chief Justice Cockburn, on April 29, 1868, reinstated the order of the lower court, holding that Scott's intention was immaterial if the publication was obscene in fact. Justice Cockburn reasoned that the Obscene Publications Act allowed banning of a publication if it had a "tendency… to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall." Hicklin therefore allowed portions of a suspect work to be judged independently of context.
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After defeating the "obligatory boss battle" (a two-headed cyclopean alligator named Janice), Vince finds a tank of helium, which he uses to inflate himself and rise to the surface. Vince arrives in Crypt City, a massive cemetery full of zombies. After a second meeting with Bones McMurty, defeating some monsters, putting some of the resident zombies to rest and destroying a massive statue brought to life by Kosmo, Vince travels to Brusque Manor. The Manor is home to Dolly, a seemingly cute doll with a short temper who tells Vince that Madam Charmaine was taken to the Carnival DePrave.
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It specialized in books which could not be published (without legal action) in the English-speaking world, and correctly assumed that the French, who were unable to read the books, and were more sexually tolerant, would leave them alone. They were books to buy if your travels took you through Paris. Since the 1950s the publication of pornographic literature in England and Wales has been governed by the Obscene Publications Act 1959. The act created a new offence for publishing obscene material, but the wording of the act is famously vague, defining obscenity as material likely to "deprave and corrupt".
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After being postponed twice, the trial began on 2 January 2012, at Southwark Crown Court in South London. The prosecution claimed that several of the scenes featured in the pornographic DVDs which Peacock sold had the ability to "deprave and corrupt" the viewer and as such were illegal. They suggested that the customers purchasing the DVDs had not been aware of their extreme content, a claim Peacock denied, asserting that those purchasing the pornography "asked me for specific titles or niches, and knew exactly what they were getting". Peacock's defence was conducted by the law firm Hodge Jones & Allen.
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The proceedings were presided over by District Judge Jasvendar Kaur. The proceedings began with arguments from the defence regarding the obscenity charge. They argued that the legal test to determine whether or not an image is obscene is whether "it has an effect which is to tend to deprave and corrupt" any person who is exposed to it, and that the prosecution has not provided any evidence that the image passes the test. They argued that Section 292, under which Amos Yee is being charged, "is targeted at peddlers and purveyors of pornography" and that it is "wholly inapt to describe the mischief (if any) in this case".
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If the university agreed to the destruction, no further action would be taken. The university Vice-Chancellor, Peter Knight, took the view—supported by the Senate—that the book was a legitimate book for the university library to hold and that the action of the police was a serious infringement of academic freedom. The Vice-Chancellor was interviewed by the police, under caution, with a view to prosecution under the terms of the Obscene Publications Act, which defines obscenity as material that is likely to deprave and corrupt. The police focused on one particular image, 'Jim and Tom, Sausalito 1977', which depicts one man urinating into the mouth of another.
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"Professor Sir Bernard Williams," The Times, June 14, 2003. It found that the existing variety of laws in the field should be scrapped, and that terms such as ‘obscene’, ‘indecent’ and ‘deprave' and corrupt’ should be abandoned as they were no longer useful.Media and Arts Law Review: Obscenity, Pornography and Art The Committee thought existing laws should be replaced with a comprehensive new statute, under which the availability of material would be restricted so that it did not cause offence to reasonable people, and was not accessible to children. The recommended restrictions on availability would not have been confined just to material that involved nudity and/or which was sexually explicit.
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Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned in 1928 but republished in 1960 by Penguin Books. The decision was taken to prosecute Penguin under the new Obscene Publications Act. Bernard Levin criticised the decision thus: "It is surely going to be difficult for the prosecution to find anybody taken seriously by the literary or academic worlds to swear that publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is not in the public interest as a literary event and that its tendency would be to deprave and corrupt those who might read it." When Manningham-Buller saw this in The Spectator, he cabled Sir Jocelyn Simon, Solicitor-General saying: "suggest seriously consider spectator 19th Reggie".
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R v Peacock was an English Crown Court case that was a test of the Obscene Publications Act 1959. In December 2009, the defendant, a male escort named Michael Peacock, had been charged by the Metropolitan Police for selling hardcore gay pornography that the police believed had the ability to "deprave or corrupt" the viewer, which was illegal under the Obscene Publications Act. He was subsequently acquitted through a trial by jury in January 2012. At the time, Peacock was the only individual to have successfully pleaded 'not guilty' under the Act in a case involving the kind of gay BDSM pornography which he published.
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While these acts were themselves not illegal in the United Kingdom at the time, the Human Exploitation and Organised Crime Command of the Metropolitan Police considered such DVDs illegal under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959, which prohibited the sale of materials that could "deprave and corrupt" the viewer. In January 2009 they sent an undercover police officer to purchase some of these DVDs from Peacock at his home in Finsbury Park, North London. On 14 December 2009, the Metropolitan Police charged Peacock with six counts under the Obscene Publications Act 1959. If found guilty he could have faced a five-year prison sentence.
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The jury, of both men and women, were shown several hours of footage from Peacock's DVDs - including images on BDSM, urolagnia and a man being punched in the testicles - in an attempt to decide whether they could "deprave or corrupt" the viewer. Richardson later related that although "they were quite shocked initially, they started to look quite bored very quickly". During the trial, the court had repeatedly warned the jury not to convict on any "impulse of homophobic disgust" that they might have regarding the acts taking place in the DVDs. After four days, the trial came to an end on 6 January 2012.
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In summing up the case, the Recorder James Dingemans QC stated that the jury must decide whether the pornography did breach the Act, and noted that "in a civilised society, lines must be drawn". It subsequently took the jury two hours to come to a verdict of "not guilty", deciding that the scenes depicted in the DVDs were unable to deprave or corrupt any viewer watching them. Nigel Richardson later told the press that the jury had recognised that the pornography found in the DVDs would only be seen by "gay men specifically asking for this type of material" and not by the general public.
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The same penalty applies to any person who advertises such material or displays it in public or sells, hires or offers it for sale or hire even though it is not in public or to any person who distributes or submits it for distribution by any means. If the offense is committed with intent to deprave, it is considered to be an aggravating circumstances. Paragraph 404 – Any person who himself or through some mechanical means sings or broadcasts in a public place obscene or indecent songs or statements is punishable by a period of detention not exceeding 1 year or by a fine not exceeding 100 dinars.
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Justice Cockburn reasoned that the Obscene Publications Act allowed banning of a publication if it had a "tendency ... to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall." This test became known as the Hicklin test and allowed portions of a suspect work to be judged independently of context. If any portion of a work was deemed obscene, the entire work could be outlawed. This interpretation was clearly a major change from Campbell's opinion only ten years before – the test now being the effect on someone open to corruption who obtained a copy, not whether the material was intended to corrupt or offend.
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The Austin Chronicle called the song a "demented Bollywood fever dream [that] manages to out-deprave R. Kelly." SPIN said that the song was "so sophomoric that [it borders] on surreal, all syncopated dis-gibberish and loony celebrity- baiting." The New York Times said that the song was "brilliantly inane: Dr. Dre lays some curlicued sitars atop a lazy bass line, while Eminem pays tribute to Hilary Duff and the Olsen Twins, delivering his rhymes in a thick accent that's supposed to be either Triumph the Insult Comic Dog or Arnold Schwarzenegger (apparently, they talk the same)." Slant Magazine called "Ass Like That" "a whole song devoted to Robert Smigel’s Triumph The Insult Comic Dog".
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In an opinion issued on 19 February 1929, Magistrate Hyman Bushel declined to take the book's literary qualities into account and said The Well was "calculated to deprave and corrupt minds open to its immoral influences". Under New York law, Bushel was not a trier of fact; he could only remand the case to the New York Court of Special Sessions for judgement. On 19 April, that court issued a three-paragraph decision stating that The Well's theme – a "delicate social problem" – did not violate the law unless written in such a way as to make it obscene. After "a careful reading of the entire book", they cleared it of all charges.
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The Christ Apostolic Church believes that God is revealed in The Unity of the Godhead and the Trinity of the persons therein, man's deprave nature, the need for repentance and Regeneration, and the Eternal Doom of the finally impenitent. The Virgin Birth, sinless Life, Atoning death, Resurrection, Ascension and Abiding Intercession of Jesus Christ, Justification and Sanctification. Also, the church believes in The Baptism of the Holy Ghost and the nine gifts the edification, exhortation and comfort of the Church, which is the Body of Christ, Baptism by immersion, of the Lord’s Supper, the Divine Inspiration and Authority of the Holy Scriptures. Furthermore, Church Government by Apostles, Prophets, Evangelist, Pastors, Teachers, Elders and Deacons.
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If the offense is committed with intent to deprave, it is considered to be an aggravating circumstances. Paragraph 404 – Any person who himself or through some mechanical means sings or broadcasts in a public place obscene or indecent songs or statements is punishable by a period of detention not exceeding 1 year or by a fine not exceeding 100 dinars. Paragraph 434 – Insult is the imputation to another of something dishonorable or disrespectful or the hurting of his feelings even though it does not include an imputation to him of a particular matter. Any person who insults another is punishable by a period of detention not exceeding 1 year plus a fine not exceeding 100 dinars or by one of those penalties.
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The First Amendment puts protection for expressive content in terms that are both sweeping and absolute: "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" Despite this broad protection, the roots of U.S. attempts to legally suppress obscenity extend back to the English common law offense of obscene libel and censorship of stage plays by the Master of the Revels. American definitions of obscene material were variable and sporadic until 1879, when the test adopted in the English case Regina v. Hicklin (1868) was used in the prosecution of D. M. Bennett. This test regarded all material tending "to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences" as obscene, regardless of its artistic or literary merit.
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Under the common law rule that prevailed before Roth, articulated most famously in the 1868 English case Regina v. Hicklin, any material that tended to "deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences" was deemed "obscene" and could be banned on that basis. Thus, works by Balzac, Flaubert, James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence were banned based on isolated passages and the effect they might have on children. Samuel Roth, who ran a literary business in New York City, was convicted under a federal statute criminalizing the sending of "obscene, lewd, lascivious or filthy" materials through the mail for advertising and selling a publication called American Aphrodite ("A Quarterly for the Fancy-Free") containing literary erotica and nude photography.
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The Act is relatively short, divided into 5 sections, the fifth covering the extent of the Act and its commencement date. Section 1 covers the test to determine if something is obscene; an article is taken to be obscene if the entire article "is, if taken as a whole, such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely, having regard to all relevant circumstances, to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it". The test is based on "persons"; DPP v Whyte [1972] AC 849 established that it was not sufficient for an individual to be depraved or corrupted, it must be that a significant number of people likely to read it would become corrupt.Barnett (1997) p.
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John Stuart Mill, in his letter of November 6, 1867 to Alexander Bain, wrote: :Besides these I have been toiling through Stirling’s Secret of Hegel. It is right to learn what Hegel is & one learns it only too well from Stirling’s book. I say "too well" because I found by actual experience of Hegel that conversancy with him tends to deprave one’s intellect. The attempt to unwind an apparently infinite series of self-contradictions, not disguised but openly faced & coined into [illegible word] science by being stamped with a set of big abstract terms, really if persisted in impairs the acquired delicacy of perception of false reasoning & false thinking which has been gained by years of careful mental discipline with terms of real meaning.
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In the Obscene Publications Act 1857 debate, Lord Campbell, HL Deb (25 June 1857) col 329 said obscene meant 'exclusively to works written for the single purpose of corrupting the morals of youth, and of a nature calculated to shock the common feelings of decency in any well regulated mind'. In R v Hicklin (1868) LR 3 QB 360, Lord Cockburn CJ (a notorious womaniser) held there immunity for a medical treatise depended on the circumstances, and the author's intent could be taken into account. The Obscene Publications Act 1959 defines 'obscene' as having the effect to 'deprave and corrupt' people, and allows police or the Director of Public Prosecutions to search and seize obscene material, subject to a defence for literary, artistic, scientific or other merit.
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The retail store had been run by Glass with his then-wife Helena Glass until they sold it late in 1981 to siblings Nigel and Diane Rennard. In July the following year Baker reported that Glass had been fined $750 for having sold US punk rockers, Dead Kennedys' 1981 single "Too Drunk to Fuck" in his store. The judge, Patrick Street, described the track as "the vilest of trash ... likely to deprave and corrupt" – Glass responded that the store had held some 40 recordings that were similar. In late 1981 and early 1982 Glass was observing Cohen who was working in AAV studio in Richmond with The Birthday Party on their album, Junkyard (May 1982) when they were visited by The Go-Betweens.
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184 which included extracts from The Evil Dead (1981) considered by her "the number one nasty". It was "a highly effective means of lobbying the government to introduce tight state controls on the burgeoning video industry". Around 1986, papers released in late December 2014 indicate, Whitehouse met with Thatcher on at least two occasions to discuss the possibility of banning sex toys using a potential extension of the "deprave and corrupt" provision in the Obscene Publications Act 1959.Ben Tufft "Thatcher wanted to ban sex toys using anti-pornography laws after pressure from campaigners" , The Independent, 30 December 2014 The plan was abandoned because home secretary Leon Brittan thought the concept of public taste would be a problematic concept for legal action.
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The definition of a "child" in the Act included depictions of 16- and 17-year-olds who are over the age of consent in the UK, as well as any adults where the "predominant impression conveyed" is of a person under the age of 18. The Act made it illegal to own any picture depicting under-18s participating in sexual activities, or depictions of sexual activity in the presence of someone under 18 years old. The law was condemned by a coalition of graphic artists, publishers, and MPs, who feared it would criminalise graphic novels such as Lost Girls and Watchmen. The government claimed that publication or supply of such material could be illegal under the Obscene Publications Act, if a jury would consider it to have a tendency to "deprave and corrupt".
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The legal concepts of obscenity underpinning Anderson and Heap's trial go back to a standard first established in the 1868 English case of Regina v. Hicklin.Pagnattaro 218 In this case, Lord Chief Justice Cockburn defined the "test of obscenity" as "whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall."qtd. in Pagnattaro 218 This standard, known as the Hicklin test, went on to influence American jurisprudence, first in United States v. Bennett (1879), upholding a court charge based upon the Hicklin obscenity test and allowing the test to be applied to passages of a text and not necessarily a text in its entirety.
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According to author Richard Spence, Quinn was a supporter of the Irish nationalist cause and associated with figures such as John Devoy and Roger Casement, although he had reportedly worked for British Intelligence services before, during, and after World War I. In this role he acted as case officer for, among others, Aleister Crowley, who was an agent provocateur posing as an Irish nationalist in order to infiltrate anti-British groups of Irish and Germans in the United States. In the early 1920s Quinn represented Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap for their publication in The Little Review of serial portions of James Joyce's Ulysses, which the U.S. Post Office had found "obscene".Henry Louis Gates, "Book Review: To 'Deprave and Corrupt': Girls Lean Back Everywhere", 38 N.Y.L. Sch. L. Rev.
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The Obscene Publications Act 1959 defines 'obscene' as having the effect to 'deprave and corrupt' people, and allows police or the Director of Public Prosecutions to search and seize obscene material, subject to a defence for literary, artistic, scientific or other merit. Pornography, but also non- sexual gay literature, was suppressed until the 1990s,Shaw v DPP [1962] AC 220, finding obscene an illustrated magazine with contacts for prostitutes, and convicting the publisher, Shaw, for conspiracy, Lord Reid dissenting.Knuller Ltd v DPP [1973] AC 435 finding a gay magazine for men to meet other men was involved in a 'conspiracy' to 'corrupt public morals' even though homosexuality ceased to be criminal in the Sexual Offences Act 1967, Lord Reid and Lord Diplock dissenting. There are around 70 cases each year, but today the Criminal Prosecution Service guidelines only recommend charges for 'extreme' cases.
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The Obscene Publications Squad was a branch of the Metropolitan Police tasked with enforcing obscenity law, most notably the Obscene Publications Act 1959, which forbade the distribution of any article that "[tended] to deprave and corrupt" those who encountered it. In 1976, following a three-year internal inquiry, it was revealed that the squad had been running a protection racket over the Soho sex industry for at least two decades, with Detective Superintendent William Moody alone receiving an estimated £25,000 a year in bribes. Prosecutors described a systemically corrupt organisation in which new recruits were coerced into attending 'Friday night shareouts', during which officers would be taken one by one into a store room at Scotland Yard and handed cash. Over the next two years, 13 officers were jailed, earning the Obscene Publications Squad its nickname: The Dirty Squad.
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At the conclusion of the trial, the "OZ Three", defended by John Mortimer, were found not guilty on the charge of "Conspiracy to deprave and corrupt the Morals of the Young of the Realm", but were convicted on two lesser offences and sentenced to imprisonment. Dennis received a more lenient sentence than his co-defendants because he was, in the opinion of the judge, "much less intelligent" and therefore less culpable. These convictions were later quashed on appeal. Dennis later told author Jonathan Green that on the night before the appeal was heard, the OZ editors were taken to a secret meeting with the Chief Justice, Lord Widgery, who told them that they would be acquitted if they agreed to give up work on OZ. It is alleged that MPs Tony Benn and Michael Foot had interceded on their behalf.
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At the time of the introduction of domestic video recorders in the United Kingdom during the 1970s, there was no legislation specifically designed to regulate video content, apart from the Obscene Publications Act 1959 which had been amended in 1977 to cover erotic films. Major film distributors were initially reluctant to embrace the new medium of video for fear of piracy and the video market became flooded with low-budget horror films. Whilst some of these films had been passed by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) for cinema release, others had been refused certification which effectively banned them. The Obscene Publications Act defined obscenity as that which may "tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely, having regard to all relevant circumstances, to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it".
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Obscene publications were, historically, something for the canon law; the first prosecution in a court of common law was not until 1727.Wade (1959) p.179 Prior to the passing of the 1959 Act, the publication of obscene materials within England and Wales was governed by the common law and the Obscene Publications Act 1857. The common law, as established in R v Hicklin [1868] 3 QB 360, set the test of "obscenity" as "whether the tendency of the letter published is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influence and into whose hands the publication might fall", while the 1857 Act allowed any stipendiary magistrate or any two Justices of the Peace to issue a warrant authorising the police to search for, seize and destroy any obscene publications.Europe (1976) p.242 It was generally accepted that the existing law was heavily flawed, for several reasons.
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This question of whether a book had literary merit eventually prompted a change in the law in both America and the UK. In the United Kingdom the Obscene Publications Act 1959 provided for the protection of "literature" but conversely increased the penalties against pure "pornography." The law defined obscenity and separated it from serious works of art. The new definition read: > [A]n article shall be deemed to be obscene if its effect or (where the > article comprises two or more distinct items) the effect of any one of its > items is, if taken as a whole, such as to tend to deprave and corrupt > persons who are likely, having regard to all relevant circumstances, to > read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it. After this piece of legislation questions of the literary merit of the work in question were allowed to be put before the judge and jury as in the Lady Chatterley trial.
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