Ginzburg

BY SENTENCING publisher Ralph Ginzburg to three years in prison February 17, a Federal court in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania effectively denied constitutional protection for the freedom of speech. Convicting Ginzburg of violating an 1872 law forbidding the mailing of obscene material, the court sent Ginzburg to a prison whose warden has described conditions as "badly overcrowded," and whose inmates are on strike to protest the onerous conditions.

Ginzburg was originally convicted in 1963 when he dared to print a series of photographs depicting a nude black man and white woman embracing. He appealed his case for ten years, eventually taking it to the Supreme Court which ruled 5-4 that Ginzburg's magazine Eros "stimulated the reader." On the 17th Ginzburg exhausted his last appeal.

In a full page advertisement in the New York Times playwright Arthur Miller declared. "If it is right that Ralph Ginzburg go to jail then in all justice the same court that sentenced him should proceed at once to close down 90 per cent of the movies now playing and the newspapers that carry their advertising. Compared to the usual run of entertainment in this country, Ginzburg's publications and his ads are on a par with the National Geographic." The fact that this decision comes in 1972 further points up the anachronism and foolishness of all laws abridging freedom of the press.

We find intolerable the Court's total disregard for the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of the press. A free society cannot exist without a free press, and the American press can not be considered free with Ralph Ginzburg in prison.