LAKELAND, Florida — Chris Wilson, the owner of an amateur porn Web site that stirred international controversy with its pictures allegedly portraying dead Iraqi insurgents, is having trouble making bail.

Wilson has been held at the Polk County Jail since Friday night. His lawyer said Polk authorities piled on charges — 300 misdemeanors and one felony — and that has made it more difficult for Wilson to arrange his release from jail.

“I think it’s inappropriate. It’s an additional, pre-conviction punishment,” said Larry Walters, a First Amendment lawyer based in Orlando.

The charges against Wilson, a former Eagle Lake police officer, all are related to allegedly obscene content on the Web site he operates out of his Lakeland apartment.

Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said filing so many misdemeanor charges is standard procedure.

“The law is quite clear that each photograph or each video or each image is a count,” Judd said. “And certainly, had we gone through his entire Web page, we probably could have made several thousand more charges.”

Therein lies the problem for Wilson. Because of the large number of charges, Wilson’s family is having a hard time finding a bail bondsman who will write that number of bonds, according to Walters.

Also, it makes bailing him out considerably more expensive.

Bail for each misdemeanor charge is set at $500 each, and the felony charge is $1,000. His total bail is $151,000.

Normally, a defendant can post one bail for 10 percent of the total amount — about $15,000 in Wilson’s case.

But state law requires that the minimum bail paid by a defendant for each charge be set at no less then $100, according to Bartow bail bondsman Bill Kidwell.

Between the misdemeanors and the felony charge, Kidwell said, Wilson’s family would have to pay $30,100 to get him out, money that the bail bondsman does not repay the family. They would also have to pledge collateral to cover the entire $151,000, which would be forfeited if Wilson did not show up for trial.

Walters said Wilson’s family had asked the State Attorney’s Office in Bartow to combine all the counts into one charge for the purposes of the bail, but the State Attorney’s Office refused.

Chip Thullbery, administrative assistant state attorney, acknowledged that.

“We felt the original charges as filed were appropriate,” he said Monday.

“Certainly, it was not done for harassment. It was done because he possessed that amount of material.”

This is not a first for the Polk County Sheriff’s Office, Thullbery said. In any case in which large amounts of illegal material are seized, a suspect may be charged for each piece of illegal material, he said.

According to Walters, Wilson’s family is continuing to try to post bail.

Walters has set up a section on his Web site, www.firstamendment.com, where people can send in donations to assist Wilson.

Walters said Monday that he had gotten dozens of e-mails and hundreds of telephone calls from around the country from people offering their support of Wilson and expressing outrage that he was arrested in the first place.

Luke Lirot, a well-known First Amendment lawyer from Tampa who has represented clients on obscenity charges in Polk County, said that filing numerous charges against a defendant has been a typical tactic for Assistant State Attorney Brad Copley.

“Brad Copley’s chosen method of prosecution is to heap on as many charges as possible, to increase the expense of mounting a defense,” Lirot said.

Thullbery disputed that.

“The number of charges we file against a person depends on the number of crimes that the person commits,” Thullbery said. “If a person commits one robbery, we will charge him with one robbery. If he commits 10 robberies, we will charge him with ten robberies.”

Lirot filed a federal action in 1998 on behalf of a couple who wanted to open an adult-themed bookstore in Polk County. Within weeks, the Sheriff’s Office had arrested the couple and charged them with racketeering, Lirot said.

Eventually the couple agreed to close their business, leave the county and sign a deed restriction stating that the property never again could be used as an adult business, Lirot said.

Lirot said Polk County’s aggressive approach to prosecuting materials viewed as obscene “is inconsistent with virtually every area in the United States and most of the decisions coming from the Supreme Court. There’s a huge void of First Amendment rights between Tampa and Orlando.”

Wilson’s Internet business initially began as a Web site where people could send in pictures of their wives or girlfriends engaged in sexual activity.

He stirred international controversy because of his practice of allowing military personnel serving overseas free access to his site in exchange for pictures proving they really were serving in Afghanistan and Iraq.

For the past seven or eight months, Wilson has been posting pictures that show burned and mutilated bodies, allegedly of Iraqi and Afghan insurgents. The Army investigated, but could not confirm whether military personnel really were posting those images.

Wilson had been investigated by the Sheriff’s Office before. Charlie Gates, a detective who specializes in criminal activity involving computers, received a complaint about Web sites run by Wilson in March 2003. The Web sites were called www.core39.com and www.messedup.com.

Gates contacted Wilson by telephone and told him he might be in violation of Florida’s pornography statute. Wilson agreed not to promote or distribute pornography in Polk County in the future, according to a report by Gates.

In November 2004, Gates began another investigation into Wilson, regarding his current Web site. Gates was off for some time because of an illness, but when he returned he saw an article in The Ledger about the Web site.

He contacted prosecutor Brad Copley and told him he was conducting a possible obscenity investigation. Gates purchased a membership to the Web site and began documenting what he saw.

He collected 80 graphic images and 20 short movies that appeared to be obscene, and presented them to County Judge Angela Cowden, who determined there was probable cause to think all of the images were obscene.

“From September 28 until October 7 I accessed Wilson’s Web site many times. The Web site almost always had over 1,000 people logged on at any one time,” Gates said in the affidavit.

No other court date has been set for Wilson at this point, according to his lawyer.