Will Google Search Rescue Porn Defendant?
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Results from Google searches that purportedly shows that community standards in Pensacola, Fla., aren't as puritanical as they seem will be introduced at an obscenity trial next month. |
Obscenity is in the eye of the community, according to a decades-old ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court that established community standards as a test on whether materials are obscene.
But, as an article in The New York Times reports Tuesday, Google search might change that. In a novel move, the paper reports, the defense in an obscenity trial of Clinton Raymond McCowen in Florida plans to use publicly accessible Google search data to try to persuade jurors that their neighbors have broader interests than they might have thought.
In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like "orgy" than for "apple pie" or "watermelon." The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics—and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm.
Worldwide, at least when I keyword the terms on Google search, orgy generated 39.6 million results; apple pie, 6.4 million; and watermelon, 11.8 million. Of course, these results do not necessarily reflect the search habits of the good citizens of Florida's panhandle. Indeed, the term Nascar got 77 million results.
According to the analytic tool Google Trends, Pensacola ranked fifth among Florida cities in the use of orgy as a search term over the past 12 months, following Pompano Beach, Ormond Beach, Orlando and Jacksonville. Pensacola was No. 1 in Florida in searching that word in 2005, but eighth in 2006 and third in 2007 and so far this year.
But, according to the state prosecutor in the case, cited by The Times, the search result might be irrelevant because the volume of Internet searches is not necessarily an indication of, or proxy for, a community's values.
Russ Edgar, the Florida state prosecutor, said he was still assessing whether he would try to block the search data's use in court. He declined to discuss the case's specifics, but said that the popularity of sex-related Web sites had no bearing on whether Mr. McCowen was in violation of community standards. "How many times you do something doesn't necessarily speak to standards and values," he said.
A question not to be answered in this trial is whether we should redefine the term community. When people spend more time online, is it appropriate to define community as our neighborhood, city and surrounding areas and not the entire world?
