Mail.

• Position: Brief Article

U.S. District Court

PROHIBITION-PUBLICATIONS

Broulette v. Starns, 161 F.Supp.2d 1021 (D.Ariz. 2001). A state inmate brought a [section] 1983 action alleging that prison officials wrongfully withheld copies of an adult magazine to which he subscribed. The district court held that the magazines were not obscene, the prison officials were not entitled to qualified immunity from liability, and that punitive damages were not warranted. The court found the magazines, Hustler, were not obscene, even though the court noted that taken as a whole, the magazines clearly appealed to prurient interest and depicted or described sexual activity in a patently offensive way. But the magazines could not be withheld from the inmate as obscene because they appeared to "deliberately include content" that required anyone applying constitutional standard to conclude that it had some serious, literary, artistic, political or scientific...