Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, May 3, 1990 TAG: 9005030146
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: MONTGOMERY, ALA. LENGTH: Medium
Civil libertarians are alarmed by the ease with which District Attorney Jimmy Evans, a Democratic candidate for state attorney general, drove New York-based Home Dish Satellite Networks Inc. out of business.
"What's happened is some little small town in the South is setting the standard for the rest of the country," said Martin McCaffery, vice president of the Civil Liberties Union of Alabama. "It's a horrendous precedent."
Evans says adult films have no First Amendment protection. "These movies not only violate Alabama's obscenity law, they violate every state obscenity law and the federal obscenity law," he said. "This is a national scandal."
He said he began an investigation after parents complained that their young children were obtaining videotapes of pornographic movies broadcast on the American Exxxtasy Channel, which was operated by Home Dish.
"I know from experience that hardcore obscenity leads to the abuse of women and children," the Montgomery County prosecutor said. "It's bad for our community and bad for our children."
The American Exxxtasy Channel transmitted hard-core movies to home satellite subscribers, but it also operated the Tuxxedo Channel, a cable channel featuring R-rated "soft-core" porn.
In February, a grand jury in Montgomery returned more than 500 indictments against Home Dish, three other out-of-state companies and 10 people on charges of distributing hardcore pornography via satellite into Alabama.
The other indicted companies - General Telephone and Electronics Corp., GTE Spacenet Corp. and U.S. Satellite Inc. - provided the satellite capability for American Exxxtasy, but they pleaded ignorance and cut off Home Dish service.
The Tuxxedo Channel soon met the same fate. Its broadcasts to local cable affiliates and dish owners were removed from a satellite owned by General Motors Corp. after a grand jury returned another indictment against Home Dish.
Home Dish, which had reached 1.2 million cable customers and 80,000 satellite-equipped homes, had to lay off its 100 employees. Its president, Paul Klein, and three other company officials still face an Alabama extradition request.
"I can't fight it," said Klein, a former NBC executive. "I'm small and very vulnerable. I'm out of business and they're still trying to extradite me." New York Gov. Mario Cuomo has the extradition request "under review," his office said.
"Without proving that anything is obscene, Jimmy Evans has succeeded in bankrupting this company and keeping the rest of the country from seeing these movies in the privacy of their home," McCaffery said.
Evans, Montgomery's chief prosecutor since 1973, went after adult magazines in 1986, while in his first, unsuccessful bid to become attorney general.
Playboy and Penthouse magazines fought back, filing a lawsuit that accused Evans of arbitrarily listing about 50 adult magazines as obscene and then pressuring Montgomery-area merchants not to sell them.
A federal judge sided with the publishers in a sharply worded order that barred Evans from bringing criminal charges against merchants for past sales of sexually explicit magazines.
Despite the order, convenience stores and other merchants continued to refrain from selling hard-core sex magazines.
by CNB