Interviewer: Angela Siew
Interviewee: Lynette Labinger and John Roney,
Defense in Ricci v. Wisner (The "Private Parts" Case)
Category: Visual Arts
Genre: Legal
Length of Time: 1:01:27

00:00:00 AS: OK, could each of you just introduce yourselves a little bit up until the time that you got involved with the "Private Parts" case? You know, just like a little brief autobiography?

00:00:13: LL: Do you remember what year the exhibit was? We remember the dates, so it was in May, but I don't remember whether it was '78 or '79.

00:00:24: LL: Well I'm Lynette Labinger, and I'm a partner in Roney and Labinger with my partner John Roney and in May of 1978 I was an associate at Abadon, Stanzler, Beaner, Skulnik and Lipsey, which does not exist anymore. And I had been there since August of 1976 and Milton Stanzler, who is I would say the dean of civil liberties in Rhode Island, had basically one of the founding members of the Rhode Island chapter of the ACLU - very interested in the arts and theater in particular. And when this raid happened by the police, several of the people who had been involved in the "Private Parts" exhibit, helped organize it, came to Milton and asked for assistance. And others went to the ACLU and the ACLU contacted John Roney who was in another office and asked him to provide assistance. So you can take it from there… John?

00:01:46: JR: So, the raid had had a great deal of publicity and had begun simply as a student show. It was called… it was a senior project by a fellow named Les Wisner, a student by… do you have all of this information?

00:02:13: JR: OK. So, after the raid took place and there is actually a tele- there is actually a, or was a tape of the raid itself.

00:02:35 LL: The show was held at Electron Movers, which was a group that was basically run under the aegis of Robert Jungles, who I guess was a professor at RISD,

00:03:54: LL: Electron Movers basically had all sorts of commercial video equipment. Now I'm sure you cannot remember back to 1978, but if you can consider the year 1978, video recorders were not around. Tape recording, or video recording was a commercial recording with that one inch tape or something and I remember that when the police came in to execute the search warrant, the people associated with Electron Movers walked around behind them

00:03:31: LL: videotaping everything they did, and did we play that tape in court? Yeah, I think we did. So, I don't remember where that tape is. Did we make a copy and make it an exhibit?

00:03:43: LL: But basically anything that was part of that closed file, I'm sure that the exhibits were probably destroyed by the federal court a long time ago.

00:03:50: JR: Someone had tipped off the television stations that the raid was going to take place so the television stations were there when the police came. And it was, it was also televised from their point of view, it was taped from their point of view. And…by the time we were involved, our involvement really took place after that. It was the raid itself that triggered the legal issues in the case. I can't remember if Lynette and I had worked before on cases or not, but it was the basis of our

00:04:43: JR: Well, it was one of the solidifying bases of what is now a 20 what…

00:04:49: JR: 20 year partnership. But the legal issues were First Amendment issues… and testing the Rhode Island obscenity statute, which like many statutes in the country, which had been continually revised, because the Supreme Court at that particular time was obsessed over in the 60's and the 70's.the Supreme Court was obsessed with obscenity.

00:05:19: LL: I believe that if this was in May, I believe that the new obscenity law had just been passed.

00:05:27: LL: It was probably had just been signed or whatever else and had certainly not been applied and this might have been the first time that anyone really sat down

00:05:37: LL: and looked at it. And as it comes back to me now the sponsor of it whose name I can not remember, was it Mr. Dorr, something like that? It was something

00:05:51: LL: Yeah, OK. Well, he was, as I recall, mortified…. that his new law, which he had struggled so hard to get passed because the last ones had been thrown out or were invalid because of recent

00:06:08 LL: decisions by the Supreme court, was being used for this purpose because it really did make a mockery of the law and didn't conform to the law and made the law look ridiculous although as I recall there were infirmities with the law in any event but there were – even with the law as it was written – they didn't do it right. So…

00:06:37: JR: They joked that the law itself was obscene because it was very detailed in what you could and could not show.

00:06:43: JR: And, so that the law itself, became really the object of some humor and derision. And of course, the key to all this was the fact that it was the sexual aspect of it. The pornographic aspect of it, which made it big news and it actually made it to Time Magazine. It was in Time... are you aware of that?

00:07:08: AS: Yeah, I saw that the Associated Press even had it printed in Bangkok Post in Thailand.

00:07:21: JR: It really does. You're aware of the description of what the exhibit was about and the photobooth,

00:07:30: AS: Yeah, actually I found that the only people that were upset was initially in the unfolding of it was the city councilman, who

00:07:53: JR: Yeah yeah, might as well. And it was not only legally exciting, but we were in front of what is perhaps the best judge in the United States for such a case, which was

00:08:09: JR: Well, he was. Intellectually he was curious and brilliant. Lynette had been his clerk years before. He was a judge that was willing to listen to new ideas even though they seemed originally foreign to him. And this case, as it educated all of us, educated him as well. Because I remember, when we first met with him to talk about the possibility of a temporary restraining order, he was actually somewhat hostile to the case because he saw some of the pictures, he had seen some of the things from the exhibit and I think, and he had been famous as a prosecutor for prosecuting obscenity cases.

00:09:08: LL: He got a conviction on Paten Place and the way he did it was he read the entire book to the jury.

00:09:24: AS: judge and I don't know if it was particularly the type of case, but I thought it was interesting how he also asked questions of the

00:09:30: LL: No, that certainly was his style and there were points where you could tell he was personally offended by some of the pictures, he thought they were too graphic.

00:09:41: LL: But it was the kind of thing you know he could make the distinction between what he personally thought was art or not art and the importance of the First Amendment which was always a "first among equals" kind of thing with the Bill of Rights.

00:09:59: JR: I don't think that the concept of pornography as art was terribly familiar to him at the time this case started so our job was to educate him as to pornography in art. We took him through, we got a RISD professor Barry Kirschenbaum.

00:10:21: JR: And Dr. Kirschenbaum happened to be an authority on this particular aspect, not totally, that wasn't totally his field, but he was well versed in the field of pornography in art. And through him, we really conducted a lecture, with pictures in the courtroom, which of course added to the amount of press coverage as well.

00:10:46: LL: A slideshow of Greek pottery and Japanese wood block prints as I recall.

00:10:57: LL: Yeah, and a lot of very graphic, sexually explicit art. And you know, things that probably had a lot more going for them than some of the submissions, which were, you know, were… pulled together at the last minute, because that was the nature of the show and we also I think used him and someone else to explain the validity of that kind of a presentation – a theme show where you might have a really significant work of art and those kinds of things that were just kind of cobbled together. And I think, I'm sure in the art world it was probably no new concept, but for us - and we were maybe two steps ahead of Judge Pettine – really the idea in some respects I guess it really wasn't performance art, but explaining and educating the judge as to the validity from an art perspective of a theme show and that one can have an artistic endeavor in a non-juried show, and non-juried means that people bring what they think is good as opposed to having a group of artists or others who review the work and say 'this goes in" and "this isn't good enough' or 'this is too silly', you know doing a screening or filtering before the show was put together, so you had a real range of quality even acknowledged by the artists themselves or to the contributors, who would refer to some of the contributors as really significant artists - well recognized and other people you know were just basically throwing something in, they said oh it's called "Private Parts".

00:12:46 JR: Part of it, or decided they decided they would become the audience participation, the photobooth was part of the thing. The genius of Judge Pettine, I think, was that once he understood the concept of pornography as art he was willing to extend that, or to think about extending it, to consider extending it. He had a wonderfully open mind and was able to see, I remember he said to us at one point, or maybe it was after the case. He said, "When I saw what was on those Greek vases" - we showed him a series of Greek vases - "and they told me that was art, well I said 'well if that's art, certainly this is art.' " And so that's what I mean when I say he was the best judge in the country to try this particular case in front of. And we had excellent participation from the artists, from the artistic community as well as some excellent technical witnesses and the artists themselves: Les Wisner was a wonderful witness.

00:14:12: AS: What do you think would have happened if you had been assigned a different judge who would not have been so open-minded, because reading in the articles it seems like the Providence local community… there was a lot of comments where people were just outraged that the government was coming in and confiscating artifacts from what they saw as sort of a harmless, kind of fun show. So what kind of implications do you think would that, I guess of course you would have appealed that, but…

00:14:44: JR: but I think we were given a rein to prepare a case that allowed him to educate himself and to extend established principles and to understand the importance as Lynette just said of artistic endeavor in any, almost any area. So he was a good judge, he was really a good judge for that, and the prosecution was, for all their good faith was really limited in what they could say. They were limited by the statute, which was almost clearly unconstitutional. They were limited to the traditional position of the prosecution, of trying to fit this, all these pieces into a statute which was almost, in some ways not only unconstitutional but incomprehensible.

00:15:51: LL: I'm trying to remember back to whether there were any significant settlement discussions before…

00:16:01: LL:…we had the hearing and I don't think there was. I assume though I can't, I'm not sure if I don't remember or if we didn't know but the two attorneys that were representing the city were very fine people and they did not acknowledge per se, we have a problem with our case but it's hard to reflect on it you know within a relatively short period of time and see how they couldn't have seen some of the huge problems in terms of the way that the search warrant was executed alone – you know that was just did not meet clearly established standards of the Supreme Court, because in the area of First Amendment the Supreme Court had been clear that the magistrate, or the neutral decision maker had to be the one to review the material and designate what it is that, that there's probable cause that it's obscene or that a crime has been committed and direct that it be seized, and you cannot leave that to the discretion of the police officer to execute it to go around and look at the walls and say we'll take that one, we'll take that one, we won't take that one, that one's OK. Unless it's literally to say OK which one is this description, in other words a 5x8 depicting the such and such if they're not named or numbered but in this case it was just a search warrant where you're allowed to take and then it just repeated the language of the statute. And in the videotape, you could see the officers standing there, staring at the photos and then staring at the artwork and looking down at their list and saying well is that and is that. So just on that basis alone, they lost. But they never conceded that.

00:18:13: AS: I think that they were actually using an older version of the law also…

00:18:19: AS: a broader definition of obscenity which was actually the new law that was just passed.

00:18:22: LL: I think they used one of the unamended versions as opposed to the version that, they had used some substitute language which was then the law, so they had the bill before it had been amended and the version that was passed so they were wrong on that as well. I mean when you look back at it in hindsight it was like: how many different ways could they have done this wrong? But at the time, because you don't that at the time, and they were defending it… fairly vigorously, they came in everyday, they never said "look, we'll agree to all these things", in fact it was never you know difficult in the sense that we all got along, but I don't remember anything that they were willing to concede.

00:19:11: JR: I don't think that they cared enough to really work hard. It takes effort to settle a case. And they were just standard prosecutors, they picked up a case in the morning and they went to trial and they tried it and the next morning they picked up another case. So I don't think there was a great deal of effort on their part to settle it because I don't think they really cared enough about it and I don't think … they were city prosecutors trying to defend and make some heads of a state statute and I just don't think there was a lot of feeling that it was a very important issue.

00:19:56: LL: Well and as I said, since we never had any, you know, insight provided by them – it may also have been because, as you know, from reading the articles the city solicitor Ronny Glantz who was very…. quick with witticisms said that if this is good enough then we had better put jockey shorts on all the statues in Roger Williams Park. So that's the chief legal counsel for the city is making this quip, which is an indication "I don't have a lot of faith in this case". The attorneys defending the city or the police were from his office so there was certainly no, no likelihood that they were getting a strong push from him to be vigorous in defending it but it may be that because this had been initiated by the police chief that there was some kind of an internal obligation not to embarrass him by saying "you screwed up, we're gonna concede, it, there's no defense here". That's possible.

00:21:53: JR: There was a certain aspect of town gown… here too. I think that the opposition to this show came really from the Police Department. It came locally - who were offended by the fact that such a thing could be going on in their city. And that it was a part of College Hill – it was Brown and RISD and all of that. I think that contributed a lot to the fact that they decided to raid it and prosecute.

00:21:38: LL: I recall that Tom Pearlman, who was the chief instigator, hadn't…

00:21:52: AS: Yeah, that's what he said in the article and I think Chief Ricci also had never seen that

00:21:55: JR: It was the idea that it was being done by those kids up on the… those colleges up on the hill.

00:22:04: LL: And by today's standards – today's standards on cable TV, today's standards maybe on network TV, but certainly on regular cable, not even premium channels - this was the tamest thing you can possibly imagine. You know, when I tried to google this to see if I could find any of the articles and I typed in the words private parts and all I got was the movie. You know?

00:22:31 JR: To give you some idea of how difficult it would have been to - it was - to defend this statute in the context of this case…the prosecutor was questioning Les Wisner

00:22:47: JR: who was a brilliant witness and he held up a picture of a rabbit perched on back of a chicken and asked… we wish we had the picture for you

00:23:07: JR: The statute said that you could not depict intercourse between animals or humans and so the prosecutor in an attempt to cross-examine Les said "well look at this picture isn't this a picture of a rabbit having intercourse with a chicken?" And Les said, "well let me tell you what I see". He said, "I see a rabbit that looks to me like he would like to have intercourse with a chicken, but whether a rabbit can really have intercourse with a chicken is really beyond my knowledge." And the courtroom of course broke up. And the judge started to laugh. I mean it was a circus.

00:23:55: LL: And through another witness, it was probably one of the executing officers we also pointed out, using probably the same photograph, where in this description, or laundry list of things that are illegal does it prohibit graphic depictions of intercourse between animals?

00:24:18: LL: And the answer is, it doesn't, so it didn't meet the standard because it was between animals and humans so… you know another one…I remember showing a photograph that looked like two legs and a very phallic thing in the middle and I showed it to the witness. I said, "well what's that? You took, you seized this." And he said "well yes we did." "Well what is it?" I said. And he said "well it's an erect penis… between two legs." I said, "well look again, isn't that a cactus?"… which is what it was!

00:24:58: LL: Yes, he might have been a lieutenant. I don't want to demote him. I don't remember, but yes. I mean, they… they acted precipitously, they acted thoughtlessly, and it was really an indefensible proceeding in so many different ways. The tragedy of it was in two respects. One, they stopped the exhibit. It really was censored because once they took everything down, virtually everything was gone. The show closed up never to be able to be recreated. They had a limited time to run it and when they packed up the things and took them to the police station, I think it must have been raining or something…

00:25:45: LL: because when we secured them…I think we first went down because we had an order to inventory and then we were able to get everything back and give them back to people and things were … when I say destroyed, they were destroyed as art. They were still physically… like I could take this magazine and if I burned it up you would say it was destroyed, but if I poured water all over it, as a visual image you would say that it was ruined.

00:26:15: LL: And virtually everything that they seized was ruined because they took no care to secure it. Some very important photographs were totally water damaged beyond repair and the artists were heartsick over it. And so in two respects, they really did wind up censoring the show. We did get some token payments for everyone… some of it was a fair amount but that really doesn't compensate you for destroyed artwork. And then the people who wanted to see the show were denied the opportunity to do so.

00:26:56: AS: Was that a sort of a common thing, all these mess-ups by the police in terms of their haste in securing a warrant? I mean it seems as though Chief Ricci was very just personally offended by the exhibit and he said that he was responding to many complaints from the community, but I was wondering if you thought that he had a personal distaste towards this exhibit that might have motivated him to be very hasty?

00:27:31: LL: Well there's no question that what they did was marked by haste. I mean whether they thought so or not, they had the wrong version of the statute, they had a bill as opposed to the statute that was passed, that they applied for a warrant without examining what the requirements were, that they basically grabbed things that didn't even meet the descriptions that the statute, that fit the language that they had, that they didn't secure it properly, you know are all indications of haste. Whether, and I think the exhibit wasn't up all that long, it was only supposed to be up like 5 days or something, and it had probably been up for a couple of days. Whether he was personally offended or he was responding to a portion of the community or he felt that his authority was being threatened because there was an exhibit that someone was claiming was thumbing its nose at the criminal statutes, I don't know, I do recall that one of the Journal reporters was writing, you know, getting a lot of ink out of covering the story and trying to stir up controversy, apparently successful. I don't think, other than Tom Pearlman and Chief Ricci that there was any controversy.

00:28:58: LL: It was a fifth floor walkup and you really had to want to go to see it and, you know I gather they had as many East Side matron types they did, you know students

00:29:11: JR: As soon as Lorraine, it had been a student project, everyone was having fun and there was nobody waking up those stairs until Lorraine Hopkins was the Journal reporter who wrote an art beat…

00:29:26: JR: wrote the article and then suddenly everyone was trooping up five flights of stairs to get to the exhibit. Would you say that the planning and the haste for the "Private Parts" exhibit approached the incompetence of the planning for the Iraq War?

00:29:50: LL: Well, I think they spent less time planning the Iraq War, depending on who you're looking at – that was planned for a long time. (Laugh)

00:30:00 JR: My recollection, we litigated this on preliminary injunction, did we not?

00:30:06: JR: So, we never got to a hearing on the merits, at least that's my recollection, that thereafter they worked out with the City Solicitor's office a way of compensating these people, they conceded…

00:30:22: LL: We came up with a settlement later on. I can't remember, I think that by the time we finished the hearing on preliminary injunction it was, I don't think that Judge Pettine, he may never have issued an order in this case. I can't remember, I think he might have issued one. But, it was so obvious by the time at the end of the hearing that they were in the wrong that I think there was an oral order continuing the (can't hear) effect. And ultimately there was, in between the time of our hearing and the time of some next resolution, there was a case that I want to say was called D&B Enterprises that was in the state court that secured a declaration that the underlying statute, the real one, was unconstitutional, which basically made moot anything else, because that was a matter of state law, if it was unconstitutional in its entirety, then all of these smaller issues, which was even if it was constitutional, did they issue the search warrant wrong, did they have the authority, whatever else became academic because the law itself that they were trying to enforce was no good.

00:31:42: JR: Remember, these people thought that they were going to be arrested.

00:31:45: JR: Warrants had been issued. But we heard that, I don't know if we ever

00:31:50: LL: I think originally we were somewhat concerned about whether, if we went into federal court and tried to get an injunction that we'd be met with an argument that this was a matter that's being prosecuted but since they made no move to prosecute it, I think they backed off on it, I don't think we ever needed it, I think we got an injunction getting the works back which basically meant the end of any potential for prosecution.

00:32:15: AS: So the prosecution for the city wasn't gonna try to hunt down the actual… because I know that they didn't know what specific artists were actually responsible for the show.

00:32:29: LL: But in a short period of time, they were really not arguing strongly that we couldn't have the work back, and once we got the work back, there was no evidence for them to prosecute that.

00:32:42: JR: But in the meantime, to show you what type of lengths that government prosecution goes. All these people had to get criminal lawyers, I mean had to get some sort of criminal counsel because they were afraid that they were about to be arrested. And I remember that Richard Leibowitz, who was the professor of photography under whose aegis the show started - Les Wisner's project - was a very very reclusive, quiet man who lived on an isolated farm down in South County and he said to me one day, we were about to have lunch and he said, he suddenly says "You know, I never had anything to do with lawyers before." He said "Now I have a criminal lawyer and I have a civil lawyer", and he said "Tell me, what do you think I should have for lunch today?"

00:33:39: AS: So, were they, so just to clarify, different artists had approached the firm that you were working at?

00:33:52: LL: And after we determined that we all were planning to proceed, we joined forces and did it all in one case.

00:34:08: JR: for Les Wisner and I think Dick Leibowitz may have been your client.

00:34:18: LL: the firm clients and you had Les Wisner and he represented a class, I think, of artists or we eventually asked for a class of all of them and I think an attorney, Michael Melian, he represented the class of people who wanted to see the exhibit. So I don't remember if there were any others, any other individual artists. There may have been a few others besides Les and I don't remember their names, but…

00:34:48: AS: So what were the artists' reaction to this? I mean, were they scared, were they really angry?

00:34:54: LL: Well, I mean I think the initial reaction was really one of grave concern that it doesn't really matter whether you think you're right or not if the police come and take away your work.

00:35:08: LL: And they're claiming you violated a criminal law. If you're not worried about it, then you have to wonder, you know, what planet do you live on?

00:35:18: JR: I think they were all frightened. I think as any of us would be when the government really turns on you with a subpoena or a government action. You may think you're right but nobody's quite sure, they were angry as well.

00:35:53: LL: and censorship and destruction of their work and I'm not sure how much they were upset. I know I was upset at the reaction of the RISD administration, which was basically to wash its hands of any association with this exhibit and whether they had any association with the exhibit or not was besides the point, that's all they said, they didn't say "well, we didn't sponsor it, but we condemn any interference with artistic expression and we're coming…" you know, they only said the first part, they never said the second part...

00:36:35: LL; vocally, and if an academic institution I mean they're supposed to stand for things like academic freedom and one that is basically all about the arts doesn't focus on artistic freedom and concerns about censorship, then who's going to come forward and do that?

00:36:50: JR: I think that was a huge issue within the RISD faculty and the student community. There were demonstrations and meetings and things like that, over the fact that the president had declined to support them through this.

00:37:09: JR: Well, the faculty was virtually to…. they understood the issue almost immediately, it was the administration.

00:37:16: LL: But I do seem to recall and I'm not sure whether it was… I don't think it made a difference. It certainly didn't make a difference to anybody that we dealt with, but I do recall expressions of concern by some of the faculty that by coming forward and assisting us they might incur the wrath of the administration.

00:37:41: LL: So that even if they disagreed with the administration view, there still was this element that if the administration had actually come out and said "we have nothing to do with this, we had no role in this, we didn't sponsor this" and that's all they said, you know, that somehow by the individual faculty members coming forward and saying "well, I was involved in it" or "I'm involved with it now", that that might affect them adversely back at the institution. And I remember those kinds of concerns expressed by the people who came to us. Now there may have been other people who didn't come forward because of those kind of concerns and that's the kind of stuff that sticks with you over the years, that an institution that ought to know better…

00:38:31: LL: You know, did not do its job. You know, frankly, you could say the same thing about the ACLU in the 1950's, so it's not all that unique but it is always distressful because that's the kind of stuff that carries over from one generation to the next. I mean the content of the show today would be considered nothing, but that kind of response , whatever it is that needs to be defended, the people are shrinking back because they fear for themselves is the kind of thing that you can still experience, you know, from one generation to the next.

00:39:14: LL: We settled it, but yes, we settled the attorneys' fees and it took awhile for us to do that. I think we settled the attorneys' fees and we settled the amounts of payments, that took…

00:39:29: JR: I suspect that the government ultimately paid less than $100,000 .

00:39:32: LL: Oh yeah, this was not, this was back in the 70's, I mean, I think that we're talking under $50,000.

00:39:40: JR: But I think it will be a long time before they raid another art show again.

00:39:45: LL: Well it also was a, well you like to think also that it was not typical for Rhode Island though I do remember that my office had a number of cases where we dealt with the Providence Bureau of licenses over X-rated movies, which were genuinely X-rated movies and that was a combination of the law and a particular point of view at the time that they were concerned, I think not so much about the movies but about creating pockets in downtown that were seedy. And that all happened around the same timeframe, in the 70's and I guess, it must have been mostly in the 70's because I didn't do any when I came over here so it was probably mostly in that time and seems to have become nothing but there's a combination of that and the whole video, you know, video rentals that the X-rated movie theaters that I think are not as big a concern as they used to be.

00:40:56: AS: I don't know if I missed it or not, but the law, the statute, was it…

00:41:00: LL: It was declared unconstitutional, yeah maybe within a couple, a year or so, it was sort of like it happened after we did the hearing but before we got to the end of our case and because of that it eliminated the need for Judge Pettine to rule on the other aspects because that was the one that trumped everything. If the law wasn't constitutional, and they were enforcing an unconstitutional law, they couldn't proceed.

00:41:30: AS: I wanted to, I was really interested by the booth where the audience could participate because that's where it seemed that a lot of the charges of obscenity were as well as the charge that they were making money off of the exhibit.

00:41:45: LL: Yes, a quarter a picture as I recall, I mean because I remember the statute had the magic words, for commercial gain, and since everything else about the show was free, open to the public and no one was selling anything, one of arguments was this was not for commercial gain so the only thing that they could glom onto at the point was to say "what a minute, you had to pay 25 cents to take a picture in the Polaroid booth and put it up." I don't remember how that part was resolved, certainly it was like the cost of the materials kind of thing.

00:42:24: AS: I was interested in how when Judge Pettine was, because you actually brought … I read in an article that you actually brought the confiscated pictures and…

00:42:36: AS: And he said that if the photographs were to be sold from the photo booth, they were to be sold as, they would all have to be sold as one, and how he particularly, how all the other exhibits had to, I guess he found OK as legitimate art forms, but the photographs themselves he found to be kind of lewd and kind of on the line if I gather right from the articles.

00:42:58: JR: I think he probably had a difficult time swallowing them as individual photographs.

00:43:09: JR: But as a collage, which is the way they were shown, he was able to see that as art and as assembled. Remember, we spent a good deal of time

00:43:23: JR: Explaining to him after learning it ourselves the theory of collage and bringing together things that might be objectionable for other grounds as individual pieces, as a collage was in fact an art form. So that's what I think he was driving at there.

00:43:48: LL: And I think that was an interim order and ultimately because the law was unconstitutional it all became academic. Because you couldn't prosecute anyone over that.

00:44:00: JR: So individual artists could make claims against the city by proving the value of their material and one of the people that Lynette represented had a strong showing of the cost of the materials, the cost of the other works and he probably got more from it than anyone else, several thousand dollars

00:44:31: LL: It was a hand-painted photograph which made it, you know each one is unique as opposed to prints from the negative.

00:44:47: AS: I don't know if you have any thoughts on this, but the crafter of the law, Mr. Dorran, this could have just been , I don't know, journalistic or whatever, but he was really upset about how this was the first case that his law was being tested against and he speculated that there was some sort of foul play involved.

00:45:13: LL: Oh yes, collusion that to use it on a test case on something so ridiculous to make the law seem absurd, that it was ill-advised and so forth. I don't think there was any collusion. That's just giving way too much credit to

00:45:37: LL: I mean certainly there's that I know about or at the time knew about the police chief or Tom Pearlman that would suggest in any fashion that they had a hidden agenda of undermining the enforceability of the obscenity law. At all.

00:45:55: JR: I don't think they thought it was a question of the law at all, I think they liked it.

00:46:00: LL: Right. They thought they were armed, rearmed and newly armed with a new tool of law enforcement, you know it's like do you want to try out the new toy right away? But yes, I do remember he was very distraught that his new law should be applied to something that was, from the standpoint of what I think he thought the law was designed to prohibit, you know this was not your core obscenity stuff but basically to trivialize the law and show as one of the classic concepts for challenging a criminal or other law that prohibits speech is overbreath, that although it's designed to get some core speech that because it's obscene is or has some other fatal aspect to it that can be regulated that it, just the definitions swing too wide and move into the areas where they're going to change to protected speech from being made and by using the law in this way, it was a clear demonstration that it did exactly that because it went after protected speech… on the ostensible basis that it was covered by this law. So he was very unhappy, I do recall that, Harold Dorran, right?

00:47:32: AS: So were there any more cases after that, I mean certainly not as huge as this but Mr. Roney you were saying how the police might be more hesitant to so hastily try to censor art again and in the Providence community.

00:47:48: JR: I think that it was really the end of a particular era I think in obscenity regulation. Here anyway.

00:48:03: JR: I mean it didn't cause any changes but it came right at the tail-end. The Supreme Court cases became more and more tighter and definitive. I just think that not necessarily because of "Private Parts" but at that time the regulation of obscenity…changed. Became much less highly regulated, I think the police attempts at regulating obscenity were on the wane anyway, this last law and correct me if I'm wrong was an attempt to meet the standards of one of the last obscenity cases which said as you pointed out, you can't leave it to the law enforcement officer to make decisions as to what is and is not obscene. The law had to be specific.

00:49:05: LL: Well it was Miller versus California. Well, I don't, I'm really not a student of what's going on in this area but it really seems to me that the trend has been to focus on child pornography and it's a very different focus, a lot of it has to do with the Internet and access to materials that seem to depict children and between this case, the determination of the unconstitutionality of the statute and really the access to so much stuff from the 80's from video and the Internet and everything else, the kinds of ways that people have become so differently immersed in what is a graphic representation of anything today than back then that it seems to have become not been a burning issue in Rhode Island at all, I don't know that I could comment nationally, but you don't really see much in terms of

00:50:41: JR: almost 30 years later. But even then, it may have been almost generational. People like Tom Pearlman and Ricci and the people that they controlled, whether they were townies

00:50:52: LL: And the other thing is the Supreme Court at that time had acknowledged the concept that community standards can control and community standards can vary from community to community so that what is acceptable in New York City is not going to necessarily dictate, you could be acquitted in New York City and convicted in Peoria, Illinois or someplace in the heartland of the red states (laugh).

00:51:21: JR: I think Georgia started prosecuting that movie was it The Graduate? Or what movie was it? I think Georgia starting prosecuting people for mainline movies.

00:51:36: LL: I mean, when you look at today with basically global access to everything it's hard to describe a community standard as being you know a local or regional thing because access to everything is Internet, is global you know I mean, so I think that that probably overtook this more than anything. I also think that, well I do remember there were quite a number of prosecutions in the mid-70's that I recall for X-rated movies, I remember being involved in this between say '77 and I don't know before I came here, so'82. Then they really I think pretty much died out.

00:52:33: (JR in background) LL: And because the statute was unconstitutional and they were improperly handled and I think that was a lot of local law enforcement as opposed to the attorney general, whoever that was at the various points and I think that then locally they lost heart in continuing to do that so it may have been that Harold Dorran was a very prime mover and when you had the one person who was really active in it either passed on or lost interest or whatever else, then you didn't have this constant pressure, I think that was probably more significant than… I don't think there was any, ever any interest in following up on "Private Parts". I think that, as I said before, I did not get the sense when the case was ongoing that anyone who was actively involved in it from the standpoint of managing the litigation, as opposed to the chief of police, had any heart in going forward with it. For whatever reason, they didn't feel they could confess error and embarrass the chief, but beyond that they were just basically going through it and it wasn't something that was likely to be repeated because no one was taking pride of authorship in how it was conducted… and justifiably so. (laugh)

00:54:04: LL: No, I think that, well first of all there was no prosecution in that one but I seem to recall being involved in some more of those X-rated cases after that so they were still doing those and with those movies they obviously had a visual record of what it was that they were trying to prosecute but I believe all those foundered when the law was found unconstitutional, but I'm not sure whether, I guess they passed another one, but I think by that point that their heart was not in it, it was more like going through the motions rather than having someone who really thought that this was the appropriate way to spend, you know, law enforcement dollars.

00:54:46: JR: It provided us with a lot of wonderful several months of litigation and excitement and wonderful people and it was a wonderful experience altogether.

00:55:00: AS: So what other things did you take away from the case? I mean, you mentioned you learned a lot more about art. Was there anything besides, just the sort of… were there any new skills, any new experiences that you took away that you brought to other cases?

00:55:21: LL: Well every time, if you're involved in litigation, it's always an education for the attorneys. You basically have to learn somebody else's issues and get up to speed and it's almost always something that whether you thought you knew, either you didn't know it or hopefully you've learned it at that time. I certainly knew nothing about the parameters of a nonjuried show or the concept of an assemblage…

00:55:58: LL: Or the history of pornographic art, which was a little brief capsule of - I forgot there were Picassos of that slideshow too, lots of Picassos - and we met some really fine people and I think the thing that I took away from it is a lesson I unfortunately feel I have to keep learning over and over again and I repeat it to other people is that no one is immune and when you look around you and say "well I don't have to worry about that because it could never happen to me"… you're lost because that's the importance of vigilance with the bill of rights. You need to stand up for the other guy, so that government doesn't overreach its position. As we said before, here's a situation where when you look at it in hindsight, you can almost ask yourself was there anything that the city did right in that case? Because they messed it up so many different ways and yet… we had intelligent, thoughtful, responsible, law-abiding citizens who were absolutely terrified.. that they were going to lose their house, lose their freedom, lose their jobs, you know all that kind of stuff and we couldn't tell them, no you shouldn't worry about that, because you just never know what's going to happen with that and that's one of those things that I think you keep with you and take with you to the next case and it's always a concern.

00:57:52: JR: But for the ACLU, for civil rights counsel who were willing to take these cases either without fee or with a small fee these people would have tremendous economic hardship and would need to defend themselves, which is always a problem when the government comes after you.

00:58:16: AS: I just had one final question and this is more for my personal interest because I wanted to interview both of you because I'm sort of interested in civil rights law so if you guys could talk about how you got interested in law a little bit, or how you picked this area?

00:58:36: LL: Well I got interested in civil rights law when I was in college, because my last full year in college which was 1970 and that was the shootings at Kent State and everyone stopped going to class and we had teach-ins and counseling for people who were trying to avoid the draft because this was the height of the Vietnam War and it got me interested at looking at the law as a way to accomplish social reform. And I went to law school at New York and NYU had a couple of clinical law programs that also allowed students to get involved in that kind of aspect of the law that they were studying and I decided to carry it forward.

00:59:40: JR: And I had graduated from law school and the law professor who had just come back from spending a summer down in the Federal Legal Service Program came back and urged me to apply for a job at Legal Services which I had no intention of doing, I remember that I was to go down for my interview the day that the DC riots, the race riots started in DC in the late 60's and it was, I think it was a year before I ever went back but I got involved in the Legal Services, the Federal Legal Services with the federal legal government then. And far less now, but it provided programs across the country where lawyers got to represent poor people.

01:00:38: LL: was the Legal Services Corporation if that was what it was called then and at that point all of these folks who were coming out of law school who were getting involved in Legal Services programs

01:00:57: (LL leaves room) JR: tool was this, a major tool was the civil rights act so we all became civil rights… it's a much different era than it is now…

01:01:09: JR: the best lawyers went into civil rights work, work for the poor, now it's hard to find them to do that.