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Feds seek 4-to-7 years in last Bush-era adult porn case

Federal prosecutors are seeking a sentence between nearly five years and a little over seven years for a California man who was the last to be convicted in a series of anti-obscenity prosecutions launched under President George W. Bush.

After two mistrials, Ira Isaacs was found guilty in April by a jury in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. He was convicted on one count of engaging in the business of producing and selling obscene videos and four counts of distributing obscene videos. The videos in question depicted bestiality and, as the Justice Department gingerly put it in a press release, "sex acts involving human bodily waste."

In a court filing Wednesday, prosecutors asked U.S. District Court George King to sentence Isaacs to between four years, nine months and seven years, three months. The unusually wide range is due to a dispute over whether Isaacs provided drugs to one of the women who appeared in a video. Isaacs is seeking no jail time and a sentence of probation at the hearing set for Monday.

The case against Isaacs was initiated by the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force, a small Justice Department unit set up by the Bush Administration in response to protests from social conservatives that prosecutors were neglecting the obscenity laws. The unit had a mixed record in court and generally focused on materials from fringe producers rather than the big business of hardcore pornography. Lawmakers like Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) have complained that the approach of largely overlooking mainstream pornography is "misguided."

Isaacs's lawyer, Roger Diamond, said this week that his client's case had established that DOJ could not prosecute the "mainstream adult entertainment business." "We sort of forced the government to make a concession — that mainstream adult, and I mean hardcore sex, can't be determined obscene," Diamond told the industry publication Xbiz.

Attorney General Eric Holder disbanded the Bush-era unit, saying its duties could be handled by others at the department. Holder allowed pending cases to proceed, but observers say no new cases over adult pornography that have been filed since President Barack Obama's administration took office. Holder has said child pornography will continue to a be a focus for the department, though he has not ruled out bringing other cases.

Isaacs's first trial went awry after it was publicly reported that the judge assigned to the case had sexually-explicit materials on a computer server accessible through the internet. The second trial resulted in a hung jury.

UPDATE (Friday, 4:46 P.M.): This post has been updated with Isaacs's request for probation.