WWW- The former chief obscenity prosecutor for the U.S. Justice Department is praising the recent conviction of a hard-core pornographer, while criticizing the Bush administration for not taking obscenity laws seriously.

A federal jury in Florida convicted California porn producer Paul Little last week of five counts each of distributing obscene materials over the Internet and through the mail. Little ran a pornographic website and video distribution service that sold graphically-violent sex videos. Alliance Defense Fund attorney Pat Trueman, the former top obscenity prosecutor at the Justice Department, is pleased with the conviction.

“That does show that people in communities – even communities like Tampa, which has lots of sex shops and strip clubs in it – they still are willing to convict in an obscenity trial,” Trueman explains.

But the attorney admits he is less than pleased with the Bush administration’s apparent lack of enthusiasm for obscenity prosecutions.

“Look at how most children are accessing pornography,” he explains. “They get it on cable television or they get it on the Internet — [but] primarily on the Internet. That should be prosecuted if we want to protect our children.”

But he argues that is not being done. “Instead, we’ve got a couple of generations of kids now growing up with a steady diet of hard-core pornography because the Justice Department only wants to look the other way,” Trueman contends.

Some argue the DOJ does not have the resources to do more. Trueman rejects that argument.

“If they used that same amount of resources that went into this case to prosecute one of the cable or satellite companies … for having their pay-per-view fare of hard-core, illegal pornography, they’d get a conviction –and cable porn would disappear,” he remarks.

“If they used those resources to go after a hotel or motel chain … pornography [at those locations] would disappear. So, what kind of impact do you want from the resources that you have?” Trueman asks.

The Justice Department, according to Trueman, should devote its resources to taking the largest amount of pornography possible off the street with its limited resources rather than conducting “show trials” of producers of extreme porn that yield easy convictions.