Prison Porn Ban Sparks Lawsuit By Killer Dwight Pink Jr

A convicted murderer jailed in Connecticut has sued the state saying a ban on poography in prison violates his constitutional rights.

Dwight Pink Jr is serving a 56-year sentence for his part in the 1998 killing of a 35-year-old man.

The inmate, 44, claims in the lawsuit that guards have used the po ban to deny him an art book, The Atlas Of Foreshortening, which uses nude models to help show how to draw the human form.

Pink says the ban is harmful, amounts to a violation of his free speech rights and serves no meaningful objective in prison.

The state maintained in its response on Monday that none of his rights was violated.

"Any injury or harm, if any, was caused solely by plaintiff's own acts, omissions, or conduct and was not due to any wrongful conduct by the defendants," Assistant Attoey General Steven Strom wrote.

The 2001 rule bans all material that contains "pictorial depictions of sexual activity or nudity" from the prisons.

But it also says the ban should not apply to "materials which, taken as a whole, are literary, artistic, educational or scientific in nature".

Inmates were upset by the policy and threatened lawsuits.

Jaclyn Falkowski, a spokeswoman for the attoey general's office, said about a half dozen lawsuits have been filed since then challenging the ban in both federal and state courts.

She said those cases are still being litigated.

In the 1998 killing, Scott Rufin was shot up to five times in the head with two guns and stabbed in the heart seven times with a sword, authorities said. He was killed in Old Saybrook, a small town in Connecticut.

Pink led authorities to the skeletal remains two years after the killing, which he said was committed by another man.