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| Inmate challenges prison rules on porn |
| By Pioneer Press |
| Published: 12/13/2004 |
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A Supreme Court justice once said that he couldn't define pornography, but that he knew it when he saw it. Gregory Welch just wants to see it. Welch, a convicted sex offender, has sued the Minnesota Department of Corrections, claiming the prison ban on inmates' receiving sexually explicit magazines and books violates his First Amendment rights. "Just because publications of sexually explicit material may have a negative impact on some inmates in Minnesota prisons does not make it fair for the Minnesota Department of Corrections to ban publications of sexually explicit material from all inmates in Minnesota prisons," Welch says in his handwritten lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in St. Paul last week. Welch, 31, has a history of violent attacks against women and an arrest record dating to 1994. He is serving a 121/2-year sentence for criminal sexual conduct involving an attack on a woman pushing a baby stroller in Battle Creek Regional Park in Maplewood. When that sentence is over, he has to serve a year for making terroristic threats and inflicting bodily injury. Welch is the latest in a line of prison inmates across the country who have gone to court to protest ever-more-restrictive bans on material that features nudity or even partial nudity, said David Hudson Jr., a research attorney at the First Amendment Center in Nashville. While the outcomes of those cases have varied, courts generally have followed the standard set in a 1987 U.S. Supreme Court case that said prisons can restrict inmates' constitutional rights if the reason for doing so "is reasonably related to legitimate penological concerns," Hudson said. |
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