United States Ninth Circuit

In a prosecution arising from defendants' conduct relating to their business of sending unsolicited email, or spam, advertising adult websites, defendants' electronic mail fraud convictions and sentences are affirmed where: 1) no authority supported defendants' notion that a district court must provide a clear geographic definition of the relevant community in an obscenity prosecution; 2) a national community standard must be applied in regulating obscene speech on the Internet, but the district court's failure to instruct on this standard was not plain error; 3) defendants' as-applied vagueness challenge to the CAN-SPAM Act failed even applying a heightened requirement of clarity; and 4) the district court properly concluded that one defendant's related lawsuit was meritless and amounted to obstruction of justice.

Appellate Information

• Argued 06/08/2009
• Decided 10/28/2009
• Published 10/28/2009

Judges

• BETTY B. FLETCHER, Circuit Judge:, Before: PROCTER HUG, JR., B. FLETCHER and MICHAEL DALY HAWKINS, Circuit Judges.

Court

• United States Ninth Circuit

Counsel

• For Appellees:
  
• Gary Jay Kaufman (argued), Dana Milmeister, and Colin Hardacre, The Kaufman Law Group, and Gregory A. Piccionelli (argued) and Robert Sarno, Piccionelli & Sarno, Los Angeles, CA, for the defendants-appellants., Jill Trumbull-Harris (argued), Assistant United States Attorney, United States Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Indiana, Hammond, IN, and Bonnie L. Kane, Trial Attorney, Criminal Division, United States Department of Justice, Washington, DC, for the plaintiff-appellee.