Photographer's shots of nude teens ruled not pornographic
By The Associated Press
06.21.02
PHILADELPHIA — Quoting D.H. Lawrence, whose novel Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned in the United States for 30 years, a federal appeals court ruled that an amateur photographer's pictures of naked teenage girls were not pornographic.
The U.S. 3rd Circuit Court's unanimous decision, released on June 19, threw out a lawsuit by the girls' parents, who were outraged that the photos had been taken without their consent.
The suit involved pictures that photographer Kathryn Lesoine, of Waverly, Pa., took of her stepdaughter and three of her stepdaughter's friends, including a 15-year-old girl and a 16-year-old girl, in 1995 and 1996.
Some of the pictures were taken on a beach on Martha's Vineyard island in Massachusetts. The others were taken at Lesoine's studio in Waverly. All were done with the consent of the girls.
In his opinion, Judge John T. Noonan Jr., quoted Lawrence's thoughts on the difference between art and smut.
"As an author who was himself once the victim of overzealous censorship has written, genuine pornography 'is almost always under-world; it doesn't come into the open ... (y)ou can recognize it by the insult it offers, invariably, to sex, and to the human spirit,"' Noonan wrote.
Noonan added that the photographs of the girls offered no such "insult to sex or to the human spirit," and that no jury would consider them within the federal definition of sexually explicit conduct.
In the first set of pictures, the girls were photographed naked in a public shower at the beach, washing off sand. In the studio photographs, they were partially clothed. In both cases, Noonan wrote, no reasonable juror could find the photos lascivious.
The Lackawanna County District Attorney seized many of the photos in 1996, but after reviewing them declined to prosecute, saying no crime had been committed. The families filed their civil suit in 1997, but the case was thrown out by a federal judge in 2001.
The mother of a third girl also joined in the suit, but her complaint was thrown out when her daughter, who had since turned 18, filed a motion stating that the lawsuit had been filed without her knowledge and the photos had been taken at her request.