Judge Hearing Obscenity Trial Hosted Porn Site

A federal judge presiding over an obscenity trial in Los Angeles has been exposed as a porn site operator.

The Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday that Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, operated a site that included sexually explicit photos of men and women -- and farm animals.

Kozinski told the paper that he was not aware that the site was available for public viewing, and that he thought the pictures were "funny."

Kozinski had been presiding over the trial of Los Angeles filmmaker Ira Isaacs, who is charged with distributing criminally obscene pornography, including images depicting bestiality. The trial was suspended Wednesday in the wake of the Times' report on Kozinski's Web site.

The site, www.alex.kozinski.com, was down as of Thursday morning. In addition to the pornographic pictures, it also contained a video of an appearance that Kozinski once made on the television show "The Dating Game."

After the story became public, the judge said his adult son Yale ran the site and was responsible for many of the photos that were posted there.

Kozinski, a 57-year-old native of Romania, is no stranger to the headlines. He made news in the late 1990s when he opposed the 9th Circuit Court's suspension of a death sentence against convicted murderer Thomas Martin Thompson.

Kozinski said that Thompson's execution should proceed because the Court could rectify procedural errors that occurred during the trial in a future case. Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the 9th Circuit called Kozinski's line of reasoning "bizarre and horrifying."

Kozinski, in a 2005 letter to a group holding a "Judicial Hottie" contest, called Reinhardt "a judicial babe magnet." In the same letter, Kozinski said he had once appeared in a photo spread in George magazine that showed "lots of sexy pictures of me jumping."

Kozinski is also known for uttering colorful phrases from the bench. When Mattel sued Danish band Aqua for depicting a Barbie doll as a sex object, Kozinski opened the trial by saying, "If this were a sci-fi melodrama, it might be called Speech-Zilla meets Trademark Kong."