District Attorney Droney arrests film exhibitors over non‑obscene Deep Throat screening

4.2.12 WC: 191694 Notwithstanding the judge’s ruling that the film was not obscene, the District Attorney decided to arrest Stork and Hagen. The Deep Throat case was so important to Droney that he pulled one state detective off a murder investigation to watch the film and make the arrest. I tried to secure a federal injunction against the arrest of my clients, by telephoning the emergency judge. But in the midst of our conference the first show ended and the officers arrested Stork and Hagen, confiscated the film, and seized the money the society had collected for the tickets. Amidst shouts of “Free the Quincy House Two,” Stork and Hagen were taken to Cambridge Police Headquarters and booked on charges of disseminating matter they knew to be obscene, despite the reality that they knew it not to be obscene, because the judge had so ruled. A band of students marched behind them and protested the arrest on the steps of the police station. Among the protesting students were some of the same women who earlier had organized the feminist demonstration. They were furious at the feminist students who were trying to put two of their fellow students in prison for exercising their freedom of expression. As I later described this irony: ...the minute the kids were arrested, the minute the law was invoked, everything changed—the women [who called the cops] became the goats, the kids [who were arrested] became the heroes. One lesson that we all learned was that the least effective way of delegitimizing this kind of speech is to invoke the law; it has the opposite effect. You get all the good people on the side of the bad acts. Several days after the arrest, we filed a civil rights action in Boston Federal Court charging District Attorney Droney with violating the rights of Stork and Hagen, as well as those of the audience members who were denied the right to attend the three scheduled showings that had to be canceled after the film was seized. Eventually all the charges against Stork and Hagen were dismissed, after the lawsuit forced the District Attorney to admit, under oath, that he had willfully defied the judicial determination that Deep Throat was not obscene under Massachusetts Law and that his goal was to serve as a “censor,” regardless of the law. The “Quincy House Two” were free and life returned to normal at Harvard. My encounters with fundamentalists, feminists and pornographers made clear to me the important, and often underestimated, relationship between the court of law and the court of public opinion. Ifa visitor from Mars, our even from Europe, were to read only the Supreme Court decisions on obscenity, he would come away with a totally false picture of the law of obscenity in action—or inaction. I once had a European student who wanted to study why there is so much censorship of erotic material in the United States. He had come to his erroneous conclusion from reading United States Supreme Court decisions. I told him that before he undertook his study, he should visit some video stores (this was several years ago) and adult-only movie theaters. He did and came 115 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017202