Yesterday, I had to make several unaccustomed trips down to the newsroom to get page proofs as I was cranking out the pages in Mike’s absence. (We don’t have a printer that big on our floor.)
Anyway, on one of the trips, Adam Beam stopped me as I passed his desk to pass on a message. First, he told me about this story he was working on:
S.C. won’t charge 2 for racy e-mails
By ADAM BEAMTwo former managers at the Department of Corrections will not face criminal charges for using state computers to send e-mails of naked women, state Attorney General Henry McMaster said Friday.
While using state computers to view the images violated Corrections Department policy, it is not a crime.
The announcement comes seven months after state Sen. Mike Fair, R-Greenville, initiated the investigation in May with a letter to McMaster’s office that alleged “very graphic pornography” was being exchanged “among high-level employees on state computers.”…
Adam said he had asked Henry to be specific about why he did not regard the pictures as being obscene. What was difference to Henry, he asked, between mere pictures of nekkid women and "very graphic pornography."
Henry begged off on that. He said if Adam somebody to give him an expert opinion on whether pictures were obscene or not, "Ask Brad Warthen."
Having not even attended law school, I suppose I should be flattered that our esteemed attorney general would cite me as a greater authority on any aspect of the law.
Of course, if the attorney general trusts me with such a solemn responsibility, I can’t be careless or flippant about it. So I told Adam I couldn’t give him a definition of the terms just off the top of my head, without evidence of any sort. I’d have to see the pictures first.
Made ya look, didn’t I?
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Brad … Sounds like there’s some history between you and Henry on the obscenity subject? … Or perhaps it’s just that he hasn’t mellowed much in his attitudes toward the press? I can remember interviewing him decades ago on various stories, and even then he had a tendency to make snide comments about colleagues, or to treat us in a rude and condescending fashion. In fact, at the end of interviews, it was not uncommon for Henry to demand that a reporter read back quotes of his comments, with the threat of making himself inaccessible in the future if the reporter declined. … But back to the case of the dirty prison pictures. Henry was probably just peeved because he had to look at the pics closely in the line of duty, on a government computer, or review print-outs with others in his office as a part of the official investigation. But of course that’s distasteful and required of a man in his postion, where careful study is necessary to determine what is obscene and what is not, according to the finer points of case law. As they say, it’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.
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