SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — The ongoing Free Speech saga pitching one South Dakota inmate against his prison’s policy banning sexual content will continue after the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals again agreed to consider the case.
The appellate court heard inmate Charles Sisney’s case, concerning his access to certain books and images, in 2018 and “sent it back to South Dakota federal court for a new approach to assessing the policy,” South Dakota Public Broadcasting (SDPB) reported today. “That new order was issued a year ago. The Department of Corrections disagreed with the federal district judge’s findings and appealed. The Eighth Circuit heard those arguments last week.”
According to the report, the appellate court has now taken the case under advisement and will issue an opinion at a later date.
Sisney alleges the prison’s blanket policy prevents him from accessing a variety of material, including photos of paintings and sculptures by Michelangelo, an art book titled “Matisse, Picasso, and Modern Art in Paris,” “Pretty Face” manga comics, some erotic prose and “a copy of the iconic Coppertone ad showing a toddler on a beach whose puppy has tugged down the back of her swimsuit,” SDPB reported.
As XBIZ reported at the time, Judge Lawrence Piersol's ruling in June 2020 let the Department of Corrections (DOC)’s ban on the manga and the Coppertone ad stand. He added that “nudity in and of itself can’t be the basis for a ban, but depicting nudity of minors is prohibited,” SDBP reported.
Sisney’s lawyer alleged that “this policy has been used to prohibit Parents Magazine, Biblical Archaeology, a text on the Holocaust, Architectural Digest, and Scientific American, all of which supposedly contain sexually explicit material.”
The lawyer for the DOC alleged that even written depictions of sex should be banned for inmates since “erotic prose or images of nudity can be used as currency in the prison population’s barter system.”
According to the report, the lawyer read a sex scene from one of the books Sisney has been denied and claimed that the “evidence right there shows that this can be destructive to the security and order of the prison, and especially with the rehabilitation of sex offenders.”
Main Image: Michelangelo's Adam, an image considered "pornographic" by the South Dakota Department of Corrections