Raised in Ohio, Thompson earned his B.A. at Denison University, and his J.D. at Vanderbilt University Law School (1976). He has been practicing law in Miami, Florida, since 1977 as a personal injury (medical malpractice) attorney. He has been a stay-at-home father for his young son, and he has seen firsthand the influence of television, for example, on his own child.
He has been actively and prominently involved in First Amendment issues since 1987, and he has discussed his work on such programs as Nightline, Good Morning America, 48 Hours, Oprah, and others. His accomplishments in this arena include securing the first decency fines ever levied by the Federal Communications Commission in American history, in a case against three shock radio stations.
He also served as the court-appointed amicus curiae in the 2 Live Crew federal obscenity trial, which resulted in the first verdict in American history declaring a sound recording to be obscene. His role in the case spawned a successful 130-campus university debate and lecture tour on the issue of prosecuting obscenity in our popular culture and entertainment, including music. During the tour, Thompson debated such liberal luminaries as Nadine Strossen (president of the American Civil Liberties Union) and Bob Guccione, Jr. (publisher of SPIN magazine) on First Amendment issues, and on the link between sexually violent material and rape. Thompson has represented rape victims, whose cases led him to his activism on the issue.
In 1992, he appeared on behalf of Lt. Col. Oliver North's Freedom Alliance at the annual Time Warner shareholders' meeting regarding the rapper Ice-T's song, Cop Killer. During the meeting, Thompson said to the skeptical audience that "eventually parents whose children are harmed by your corrosive entertainment will successfully sue you for damages." This statement turned out to be amazingly prescient: In March 1999, the U.S. Supreme Court granted limited approval to such a lawsuit based upon copycat crimes allegedly inspired by Natural Born Killers, a Time Warner film.
Nine days prior to the April 20, 1999, murders at Columbine High School, Thompson filed a federal products liability lawsuit filed on behalf of the six parents of the three students shot and killed by a classmate at a school in Paducah, Kentucky, in 1997. The defendants in this $130 million lawsuit are in three categories: the makers and distributors of The Basketball Diaries, an explicitly violent film; sexually violent Internet pornography sites; and the designers, makers, and distributors of point-and-shoot video games, which function as murder simulators that train teens how to kill and to learn the "joy" of killing. Some of the same products allegedly influenced the murderers in Littleton, Colorado.
Thompson has built the Kentucky case on a simple theory: If certain entertainment giants make products that harm someone, then they must pay damages for that harm. The First Amendment does not bar recovery for copycat crimes that can be shown to have occurred through the reckless use of violent images by entertainment companies. He has discussed his Kentucky lawsuit on many programs, including the Today show, 60 Minutes, and ABC's World News Tonight.
Jack Thompson is now much in demand on college campuses, where he participates in debates on such issues as how popular culture affects, and may cause, violence; censorship and the First Amendment; and other related issues. His work promises to influence the debate about the impact that violent entertainment has on our society for many years to come.
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