John B. 'Jack' Thompson is a controversial and outspoken attorney often cited in the media for his views on the effects of obscenity and violence in popular media. Thompson, in 1992, was named named a "top ten" censor by the American Civil Liberties Union.
A native of Ohio, he is a 1976 JD graduate of Vanderbilt University School of Law and has been practising as a medical malpractice attorney in Florida since 1977.
Loss To Janet Reno
In 1988 Thompson was the unsuccessful GOP challenger to Janet Reno for
the Office of Dade County State Attorney. Following this, as the "Man in Miami" for NewsMax.com, he made a series of bizarre allegations [1] regarding Reno, met with incredulity in the press [2],[3], claiming that she was a closet lesbian suffering from various mental disorders as side effects of Alzheimer's medication, and that she was being blackmailed by the Mafia.
Cases
Ileana Flores
He first came into the public eye in 1986 when he represented Ileana Flores in her divorce from Frank Fuster. Fuster had been convicted the previous year of multiple counts of child abuse in the controversial Country Walk Case .
First Ammendment Issues
Following that case he became prominently involved in First Amendment issues, particularly concerning the possible effects of sexually violent material. The Florida Supreme Court somewhat oddly ordered that he undergo psychiatric testing during this campaign, which he successfully passed. He lated quipped that this made him one of the few sane lawyers working in the state.
2 Live Crew Suit
He led the campaign against the 1989 2 Live Crew album As Nasty As They Wanna Be. In the 1990 federal trial which ruled the album obscene, he submitted material as an amicus curiae. He would reprise this role as a third-party "expert" in various videogames cases (see below). The court's decision led to the arrest of several members of the group and a record retailer, although the ruling was soon reversed.
Freedom Alliance
In 1992, he represented Oliver North's Freedom Alliance at the annual Time Warner shareholders' meeting, regarding Ice T's song Cop Killer. He put forward the argument that, should the song inflame listeners and lead to the killing of police officers, widows would be able to sue Time Warner over the content of the record. Time Warner subsequently dropped the performer.
Videogame Cases
In 1999 he filed a $130 million federal products liability lawsuit against several entertainment companies on behalf of the parents of victims of the 1997 Paducah schoolhouse shootings. These included the producers and distributors of the movie The Basketball Diaries, Internet sex website operators and a variety of video game producers. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the case in 2002, ruling that it was "simply too far a leap from shooting characters on a video screen to shooting people in a classroom."
Despite the failure of the Paducah lawsuit, Thompson has continued to pursue in court the makers of violent video games. For example, he has attempted to link the Columbine High School massacre and the Washington Sniper to first-person shooters, in the latter making various claims regarding God mode and the zoom function of Halo's sniper rifle and pistol. He has frequently attacked Rockstar, linking Rockstar North's Manhunt game and Grand Theft Auto series to a wide variety of murders, particularly those involving vehicles or weapons other than firearms.
Some consider him to be a Wertham-like figure in the video gaming world. While Thompson lacks Wertham's psychology background, and his actions have not lead to a censorship movement, neither has succeeded in connecting the media in question to violent crime in the eyes of the US Government.
More recently, he has attempted to persuade the lawyers defending Dustin Lynch , charged with the murder of JoLynn Mishne , that videogames were responsible for the defendant's actions. The lawyers have declined to do so, and Thompson has subsequently offered to defend Lynch for free, presumably in the hope that he may use the "video games defense".[4]
As well as propogating the "video games made me do it" defense, Thompson has also attempted to predict which violent crimes will be caused by specific videogames; in the Washington Sniper case, he was the first individual to suggest to the press that videogames may have been the source of the sniper's skills, a belief vindicated by the discovery of a ubiquitous PlayStation in the van used as a "mobile hideout" by the sniper. Note however that the sniper was a former soldier with formidable rifle training, as predicted by the police. He also proactively linked Grand Theft Auto 3 to violent crime in general, although he failed to do so in the case of Manhunt.
In one[5] of a series ([6], [7], [8]) of "videogame violence" interviews by CBS, he compared Doug Lowenstein of the Entertainment Software Alliance to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, although the response has since been edited[9].
Howard Stern
An indecency complaint he filed with the FCC regarding the contents of a 2003 edition of Howard Stern's radio show resulted in Clear Channel Communications being fined $495,000 in 2004. The network subsequently dropped Stern from 6 of their stations.
See also
External links
