PITTSBURGH -- The owners of a California company that distributes pornographic videos depicting simulated rape and murder has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute obscene materials.
Robert Zicari, 35, of Northridge, Calif., pleaded guilty Wednesday in Pittsburgh federal court on behalf of Extreme Associates Inc. His wife, Janet Romano, 32, also pleaded guilty.
"Ultimately, you'll get to see the real 'Rob Black' (Zicari's character name) when we come back for sentencing. Rob's a very sweet man," said his attorney, H. Louis Sirkin.
Zicari and Romano declined to comment.
Prosecutors charged them in 2003 with distributing videos through the mail and images over the Internet to western Pennsylvania.
U.S. District Judge Gary Lancaster dismissed the charges in January 2005, finding that the prosecutors improperly applied obscenity statutes. The charges
were later reinstated by an appeals court.
Lancaster accepted Wednesday's pleas from Zicari and Romano and scheduled their sentencing for July 1. The maximum penalty is five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
Sirkin will ask for a sentence of 10 to 16 months, half of which could be served in a halfway house. The government is pushing for 27 to 33 months.
The couple decided to plead guilty because prosecutors agreed not to calculate how much they earned from the porn business, which could have affected their potential sentence, Sirkin said.
Obscenity Test
Federal prosecutors used the U.S. Supreme Court's
Miller v. California ruling from 1973 to argue their case against Extreme Associates in Pittsburgh.
The ruling says that materials are obscene if they pass a three-part test:
The average person, applying contemporary community standards (not national standards, as some prior tests required), must find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest.
The work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law.
The work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
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