If you're into bondage and discipline, the Supreme Court just asserted its dominance. It involves New York man Glenn Marcus and whether his bondage and discipline relationship with one of his voluntary "slaves" was truly voluntary. The specific issue in the appeal to the Court is more procedural, though, as summed up by the always useful ScotusBlog:

Whether the Second Circuit departed from the Court’s interpretation of Rule 52(b) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure by adopting as the appropriate standard for plain-error review of an alleged ex post facto violation whether there is any possibility that the defendant could have been convicted based exclusively on conduct that took place before the enactment of the statutes in question.

It seems that the U.S. is upset because it lost an appeal of Marcus' original conviction because some of the actions before the jury in Marcus' trial happened before the law he was convicted of violating, the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000, had been passed.

Here are the details, which sound more like a movie screenplay treatment for a steamy but ultimately depressing as hell Japanese erotic film: The first time Jodi met Glenn Marcus, he whipped her and used a knife to carve the word slave on her stomach. During the next five years she kept coming back for more, engaging in BDSM sessions with him that included handcuffing, branding, whipping, and choking. Marcus posted photographs of the sessions on his website, which also featured Jodi's diary entries. In October 1999, she testified, she had "a moment of clarity," and from then on her relationship with Marcus was nonconsensual. Yet she continued to meet with him periodically for four more years, moving from the Midwest to Maryland and later to New York City at his behest. She also worked on his website. She said Marcus at one point told her he would show her pictures to her family and the news media if she ever left him.

This news items leaves me wondering when the Supreme Court will rule on something tantricky?

See: http://reason.com/blog/2009/10/13/bondage-and-discipline-make-th