Jack Thompson (activist)

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Jack Thompson

For other people named Jack Thompson, see Jack Thompson (disambiguation).

John Bruce "Jack" Thompson (born July 25, 1951) is an American attorney and activist against obscenity and violence in media and entertainment, based in Coral Gables, Florida. Thompson describes himself as "[a] Christian conservative and a Republican".

After an initial foray into politics, Thompson concentrated his efforts on activism against obscenity in rap music. More recently, he has focused on violence as well, particularly in the content of computer and video games and their effect on children. This includes lobbying for legislation restricting distribution of these games and filing lawsuits on behalf of the victims of crimes committed by juveniles allegedly inspired by violent video games.

Thompson grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and attended Denison University. He went to law school at Vanderbilt University, where he met his wife, Patricia.

Campaign against Janet Reno

Thompson first met Janet Reno in November 1975, when he applied for a job as an assistant State's Attorney in Dade County. He was not hired. In 1976, Thompson and his wife moved to Florida, where he worked as a lawyer and then a fundraiser for a Christian ministry, while she practiced corporate law. In 1988, he ran for prosecutor against then incumbent Dade County State Attorney Janet Reno. At the time, Thompson was involved in a feud with local radio host Neil Rogers and Reno had declined his request to prosecute Rogers. Thompson also sued the station that aired Rogers for violating a December 1987 agreement to end on-air harassment against him. Thompson had complained to the station after Rogers solicited homosexuals to join him on his vacation; Rogers aired Thompson's address and phone number. Thompson claimed one of the terms of his agreement with the station was that it would pay him $5,000 each time his name was mentioned. For the next eight months he recorded all of Rogers' broadcasts and documented 40,000 mentionings of his name, so he asked for $200 million in the suit.

Thompson's campaign for prosecutor was reportedly also prompted by rumors that Reno was lesbian. He gave Reno a letter at a campaign event requesting that she check a box to indicate whether she was homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual. Thompson said that Reno then put her hand on his shoulder and responded, "I'm only interested in virile men. That's why I'm not attracted to you." He filed a police report accusing Reno of battery for touching him, so she asked Florida governor Bob Martinez to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate. The special prosecutor rejected the charge and concluded that Thompson did it as "a political ploy." Reno was ultimately re-elected with 69% of the vote. Thompson repeated allegations that Reno was lesbian when she was nominated as U.S. Attorney General, leading one of her supporters, lieutenant governor Buddy MacKay, to dismiss him as a "kook".

In 1990, after his election loss, Thompson began a campaign against the efforts of Switchboard of Miami, a social services group of which Reno was a board member. Thompson charged that the group was placing "homosexual-education tapes" in public schools. Switchboard responded by getting the Florida Supreme Court to order that he submit to a psychiatric examination. Thompson did so and passed, and since has stated on more than one occasion that he is "the only officially certified sane lawyer in the entire state of Florida."

Rap music

Thompson came to national prominence in the controversy over 2 Live Crew's As Nasty As They Wanna Be album. On January 1, 1990, he wrote to Martinez and Reno asking them to investigate whether the album violated state obscenity laws. Although the state prosecutor declined to proceed with an investigation, Thompson pushed local officials in various parts of the state to block sales of the album, along with N.W.A's Straight Outta Compton. In his campaign, Thompson cast himself as a Batman-like character, a solitary figure helping law enforcement when it was unable to protect the public on its own. He portrayed 2 Live Crew frontman Luther Campbell not as Luke Skyywalker (his stage name), but as the Joker "peddling obscenity to children".

The members of 2 Live Crew responded to these efforts by suing the Broward County sheriff in federal district court. While they were granted an injunction because law enforcement actions were an unconstitutional prior restraint on free speech, the court ruled that the album was in fact obscene. An appellate court reversed the obscenity ruling, however, because simply playing the tape was insufficient evidence of the constitutional requirement that it have no artistic value.

As the debate continued, Thompson wrote, "An industry that says a line cannot be drawn will be drawn and quartered". He said of his campaign, "I won't stop till I get the head of a record company or record chain in jail. Only then will they stop trafficking in obscenity." Bob Guccione Jr., founder of Spin magazine, responded by calling Thompson "a sort of latter-day Don Quixote, as equally at odds with his times as that mythical character was," and argued that his campaign was achieving "two things... : pissing everybody off and compounding his own celebrity". Thompson responded by noting, "Law enforcement and I put 2 Live Crew's career back into the toilet where it began."

Thompson wrote another letter in 1991, this time to Minnesota attorney general Hubert H. Humphrey III, complaining about the N.W.A album Efil4zaggin. Humphrey warned locally-based Musicland that sales of the album might violate state law against distribution of sexually explicit material harmful to minors. Humphrey also referred the matter to the Minneapolis city attorney, who concluded that some of the songs might fit the legal definition if issued as singles, but that sales of the album as a whole were not prosecutable. Thompson also initiated a similar campaign in Boston. Later, Thompson would criticize the Republican Party for inviting N.W.A member and party donor Eric "Eazy-E" Wright to an exclusive function.

In 1992, Thompson was hired by the Freedom Alliance, a right-wing patriot group founded by Oliver North. By this time, Thompson was looking to have Time Warner, then being criticized for promoting the Ice-T song "Cop Killer", prosecuted for federal and state crimes such as sedition, incitement to riot, and "advocating overthrow of government" by distributing material that advocated killing police officers.

Thompson's push to label various musical performances obscene was not entirely limited to rap. In addition to taking on 2 Live Crew, Thompson campaigned against sales of the racy music video for Madonna's "Justify My Love". Then in 1996, he took on MTV broadcasts for "objectification of women" by writing to the station's corporate parent, Viacom, demanding a stop to what he called "corporate pollution". He also went after MTV's advertisers and urged the U.S. Army to pull recruiting commercials, citing the Army's recruitment of women and problems with sexual harrasment scandals.

Video games and juveniles

More recently, Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigning against their producers and distributors. His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as "simulators" to rehearse their own violent plans. He has pointed to connections between such games and a number of school massacres. According to Thompson, "In every school shooting, we find that kids who pull the trigger are video gamers." Also, he claims that scientific studies show teenagers process the game environment differently from adults, leading to increased violence and copycat behavior. According to Thompson, "If some wacked-out adult wants to spend his time playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, one has to wonder why he doesn't get a life, but when it comes to kids, it has a demonstrable impact on their behavior and the development of the frontal lobes of their brain."

Thompson has rejected arguments that such video games are protected by freedom of expression, saying, "Murder simulators are not constitutionally protected speech. They're not even speech. They're dangerous physical appliances that teach a kid how to kill efficiently and to love it." In addition, he has attributed part of the impetus for violent games to the military, saying that it was looking "for a way to disconnect in the soldier's mind the physical act of pulling the trigger from the awful reality that a life may end." Thompson further claims that some of these games are based on military training and simulation technologies, such as those being developed at the Institute for Creative Technologies, which, he suggests, were created by the Department of Defense to help overcome soldiers' inhibition to kill.

Litigation

Thompson filed a lawsuit on behalf of the parents of three children killed in a Paducah, Kentucky school shooting in 1997. Investigations showed that the perpetrator, 14-year-old Michael Carneal, had regularly played various computer games (including Doom, Quake, Castle Wolfenstein, Redneck Rampage, Nightmare Creatures, Mech Warrior, Resident Evil, and Final Fantasy) and accessed some pornographic websites. Carneal had also owned a videotape of The Basketball Diaries, which includes a high school student dreaming about killing his teacher and some classmates. The suit sought $33 million in damages, alleging that the producers of the games, the movie, and the operators of the internet sites were negligent in distributing this material to a minor because it would desensitize him and make him more prone to violence. Additional claims included product liability for making defective products (the defect alleged was the violent features and lack of warnings) and a violation of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act for distributing this material to minors. Said Thompson, "We intend to hurt Hollywood. We intend to hurt the video game industry. We intend to hurt the sex porn sites".

The suit was filed in federal district court and was dismissed for failing to present a legally recognizable claim. The court concluded that Carneal's actions were not reasonably foreseeable by the defendants and that in any case, his actions superseded those of the defendants, so that the latter could not be the proximate cause of the harm. In addition, the judge determined that "thoughts, ideas and images" in the defendants' materials did not constitute "products" that could be considered defective. The ruling was upheld on appeal.

In February 2003, Thompson asked permission to file an amicus curiae (or "friend of the court") brief in the Ohio case of Dustin Lynch, 16, who was charged with aggravated murder in the slaying of JoLynn Mishne; Lynch was obsessed with Grand Theft Auto III. When Judge John Lohn ruled that Lynch would be tried as an adult, Thompson passed a message from Mishne's father to the judge, asserting that "the attorneys had better tell the jury about the violent video game that trained this kid [and] showed him how to kill our daughter, JoLynn. If they don't, I will." In a motion sent to the prosecutor, the boy's court-appointed lawyer, and to reporters, Thompson asked to be recognized as the boy's lawyer in the case. However, Medina County Prosecutor Dean Holman said Thompson would be faced with deeply conflicting interests if he were to represent Dustin Lynch because he also advised Mishne's parents. Claiming that delays had weakened his case, Jack Thompson asked Medina County Common Pleas Judge Christopher Collier to disqualify himself from presiding over the case because the judge had not ruled on Thompson's request for two months. Lynch himself eventually rejected Thompson's offer, withdrawing his insanity plea. Lynch's mother, Jerrilyn Thomas, who previously demanded that Judge Christopher Collier appoint Thompson to defend her son, said she changed her mind after visiting with her boy in jail, saying, "It has nothing to do with video games or Paxil, and my son's no murderer."

Thompson returned to file a lawsuit in Tennessee state court in October 2003 on behalf of the victims of two teenage stepbrothers who had pled guilty to reckless homicide, endangerment, and assault. Since the boys told investigators they were inspired by Grand Theft Auto III, Thompson sought $246 million in damages from the publisher, Take-Two Interactive, along with PlayStation 2 maker Sony Computer Entertainment America and retailer Wal-Mart. The suit charged that the defendants knew or should have known that the game would cause copycat violence.

Thompson was involved another similar suit in Alabama in 2005 on behalf of the families of police personnel killed by Devin Moore, a teenager who was reportedly a compulsive Grand Theft Auto player. However, his participation in the case ran into a dispute over his pro hac vice admission to practice law in that state. The opposing attorneys sought removal of this privilege by arguing that his conduct was unethical and claiming he had threatened and harassed them in letters and emails. The judge added that Thompson had violated his gag order during Moore's criminal trial. Thompson tried to withdraw from the case, but his request was denied by the judge, who went ahead and revoked Thompson's temporary admission to the state bar. For his part, Thompson said he thought the judge was trying to protect Moore's criminal conviction at any cost. He also complained about the judge's ethics, saying a local attorney who claimed to have influence on the judge had assured him the case would be dismissed unless the attorney was on Thompson's team.

In the aftermath of this lawsuit, Thompson lobbied Alabama attorney general Troy King to file a civil suit and call on retailers not to sell "cop-killing games". After the slaying of another police officer in Gassville, Arkansas by Jacob D. Robida, an 18-year-old fugitive, Thompson again raised the possibility of a connection to Grand Theft Auto, but investigators found no evidence that video games were involved.

Thompson once reported that he had videotaped a Miami Best Buy selling a copy of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City to a 10-year-old. He eventually sued the company in the Florida courts, arguing that it had violated a law against sale of sexual materials deemed harmful to minors. In January 2005, Best Buy agreed that it would enforce an existing policy to check the identification of anyone who appeared to be 21 or under and tried to purchase games rated "M" (for mature audiences).

Activism and lobbying

In addition to lawsuits, Thompson has pushed for measures against similar games in a variety of public settings. He wrote a joint article in the Christian Science Monitor with Eugene F. Provenzo, a University of Miami professor who studies the effects of video games on children. Originally brought together to provide opposing viewpoints on 60 Minutes in the aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre, they said they had become friends and were collaborating on a book. They described themselves as having "a shared belief that first-person shooter video games are bad for our children, teaching them to act aggressively and providing them with efficient killing skills and romanticized and trivialized scenarios for killing in the real world."

Thompson incorrectly predicted that the perpetrator of the Beltway sniper attacks would be "a teenaged boy, who plays video games" and "may indeed ride a bicycle to and from his shooting locations, his gun broken down and placed in a backpack while he pedals."

Thompson has supported legislation in a number of states that would ban sales of violent and sexually explicit video games to minors. In response to First Amendment concerns, he argued that the games were a "public safety hazard". However, he rejected as "completely unconstitutional" Hillary Clinton's proposed legislation to ban sales to minors of games rated "M" for Mature by the Entertainment Software Rating Board. Thompson contended that the government could not enforce a private-sector standard but had to depend on a community standards test. He charged that Clinton was simply positioning herself politically, with the support of the gaming industry, by proposing a bill she knew would be unconstitutional.

In July 2005, Thompson sent a letter to several politicians urging them to investigate The Sims 2, alleging that the game contained nudity accessible by entering special codes. Thompson called the nudity inappropriate for a game rated "T" for Teen, indicating suitability for anyone 13 and older. Manufacturer Electronic Arts dismissed the allegations, with vice president Jeff Brown explaining that game characters have "no anatomical detail" under their clothes, effectively resembling Barbie dolls. Although the game does display blurred-out patches over body regions when characters are naked, such as when taking a shower, Brown said that was for "humorous effect" and denied there was anything improper about the game.

Beginning in 2005, Thompson supported a campaign to discourage Take-Two's subsidiary, Rockstar Games, from releasing a game called Bully, which reportedly included fights and other bullying in a schoolhouse setting. He participated in a protest at Rockstar's office that also included students from Peaceaholics, a Washington, D.C. mentoring organization. Thompson said he hoped that the pressure would get retailers to refuse to carry the game. In March 2006, a Florida school board he had lobbied passed a resolution criticizing the game, but only urged retailers not to sell the game to minors. Thompson also criticized Bill Gates and Microsoft for contracting with Rockstar to release the game on the Xbox.

At one point, Thompson was asked by the National Institute on Media and the Family to stop invoking the organization's name in his campaigns. NIMF president David Walsh felt Thompson cast the organization in a bad light whenever he brought up their name. "Your commentary has included extreme hyperbole and your tactics have included personally attacking individuals for whom I have a great deal of respect," Walsh said in an open letter to Thompson.

Relationship with industry and gamers

On occasion, Thompson has sparred directly with the gaming industry and its fans. In 2005, he wrote an open letter to Entertainment Software Association president Douglas Lowenstein, making a "modest proposal" for the industry in which he offered $10,000 to a charity designated by Take-Two CEO Paul Eibeler if any company would create a game scenario he described in the letter. In the proposed game, the main character would murder a number of industry executives, including one scene in which the main character "urinates onto the severed brain stems of the Eibel family victims", and go on a killing spree at the Electronic Entertainment Expo. When video game fans promptly began working to take Thompson up on his offer, he explained that it was satire (see A Modest Video Game Proposal for details). However, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, the creators of webcomic Penny Arcade, stepped in to make the donation instead, putting in the memo field of their check, "For Jack Thompson, Because Jack Thompson Won't." Meanwhile, Thompson tried to get Seattle police and the FBI to investigate Holkins and Krahulik for orchestrating "criminal harassment" of him through articles on their site.

In 2006, two Michigan gamers began a project dubbed Flowers for Jack, soliciting donations to deliver a massive floral arrangement to Thompson's office. The flowers were delivered in February 2006, accompanied by a letter aimed at opening a dialogue between Thompson and the video gaming community. Thompson responded by forwarding the flowers to some of his industry foes, with such comments as "Discard them along with the decency you discarded long ago. I really don't care. Grind them up and smoke them if you like." In addition, Thompson stated that he did not open the letter that accompanied with the flowers.

Other activities

In 1992, a complaint from Thompson led Florida Secretary of State Jim Smith to withhold a $25,000 grant to the Miami Film Festival; Thompson claimed that festival was using state money to show pornographic films. In response, Thompson was named an "Art Censor of the Year" by the ACLU. The next month, Thompson faced disbarment over allegations that he lied while making accusation against prominent Dade County lawyer Stuart Z Grossman. Thompson ultimately admitted violating bar rules of professional conduct, including charges that he contacted people represented by an attorney without first contacting their attorneys, and agreed to pay $3,000 in fines and receive a public reprimand.

Later that year, Thompson asked a Florida judge to declare the Florida Bar unconstitutional. He claimed that the bar was engaged in a vendetta against him because of his religious beliefs, which he said conflict with what he called the bar's pro-gay, humanist, liberal agenda. He also said that the "wedding of all three functions of government into the Florida Bar, the 'official arm' of the Florida Supreme Court, is violative of the bedrock constitutional requirement of the separation powers and the 'checks and balances' which the separation guarantees." Thompson accepted a $20,000 out-of-court settlement.

In 1999, Thompson represented the parents of Bryce Kilduff, an 11-year old boy who committed suicide, hanging himself allegedly to imitate Kenny, a character from the Comedy Central series South Park, which Bryce, according to his parents, had never watched. Thompson called for Comedy Central to stop marketing the show and toys based on the series to children. "You see, the whole show--thrust of the show is it's--it's cool for kids to act like the characters in South Park."

Although his efforts dealing with video games have focused on juveniles, Thompson got involved in a case involving an adult on one occasion in 2004. This was an aggravated murder case against 29-year-old Charles McCoy, Jr., the defendant in a series of highway shootings the previous year around Columbus, Ohio. McCoy had been captured with a game console and a copy of The Getaway in his motel room. Although not representing McCoy and over the objections of McCoy’s lawyers, Thompson succeeded in getting the court to unseal a search warrant for McCoy’s residence. This showed, among other things, the discovery of additional games State of Emergency, Max Payne, and Dead To Rights. However, he was not allowed to present the evidence to McCoy, whose defense team was relying on an insanity defense based on paranoid schizophrenia. In Thompson’s estimation, McCoy was the "functional equivalent of a 15-year-old."

In 2004, Thompson helped get Howard Stern's show taken off a radio station in Orlando, Florida by filing a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission. Curiously, he later spoke in defense of Stern during the latter's legal dispute with CBS over promoting Sirius on-air before his switch to satellite radio. Thompson contended that the technology added by CBS to edit out profanity also could have worked to edit out Stern’s references to Sirius.

See also

• James v. Meow Media
• Strickland v. Sony
• Jack Thompson and video game players
• Jack Thompson and the Jacob Robida murders

Bibliography

• Out of Harm's Way. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2005. ISBN 1414304420.

External links

• Thompson's website (devoted to commentary about The Florida Bar)
• Gamepolitics.com A blog-based website discussing video game legislation and activism.