Opinion ID: 2171926
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Obscenity Statute Issue

Text: The thrust of defendant's argument concerning the constitutionality of the New Hampshire obscenity statute, RSA ch. 650 (Supp. 1976), is that it regulates expression protected under the United States Supreme Court decision in Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973). The United States Supreme Court in Miller v. California established the basic guidelines for distinguishing between material protected by the first and fourteenth amendments, and unprotected obscene material. The oft-repeated three-prong test of Miller is: (a) whether `the average person, applying contemporary community standards' would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, . . . (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. Id. at 24. The Court attempted to establish a test for isolating descriptions or depictions of patently offensive hard-core sexual conduct. Miller v. California, 413 U.S. at 27; see State v. Harding, 114 N.H. 335, 339, 320 A.2d 646, 649 (1974). The State must specifically define or describe the sexual conduct which it wishes to regulate in order to provide fair notice to a dealer in such materials that his public and commercial activities may bring prosecution. Miller v. California, 413 U.S. at 27. The Court also intended to place a limitation on the types of sexual conduct a State may regulate. While not limiting States to these examples, the Court said that (a) [p] atently offensive representations or descriptions of ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated . . . [and] (b) [p] atently offensive representations or descriptions of masturbation, excretory functions, and lewd exhibition of the genitals were the types of hard-core sexual conduct which the States could regulate. Miller v. California, id. at 25. Cases after Miller make it clear that part (b) of the Miller test and the examples given by the Court were intended to be a substantive limitation on the sexual conduct a State may list in its statute. In Jenkins v. Georgia, 418 U.S. 153, 160-61 (1974), the Court said that the examples given in Miller were certainly intended to fix substantive constitutional limitations, deriving from the First Amendment, on the type of material subject to such a determination [of obscenity]. It would be wholly at odds with this aspect of Miller to uphold an obscenity conviction based upon a defendant's depiction of a woman with a bare midriff, even though a properly charged jury unanimously agreed on a verdict of guilty. The Court reiterated this position in Hamling v. United States, 418 U.S. 87, 114 (1974):  Miller . . . was speaking in terms of substantive constitutional law of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. . . .[T]here is a limit beyond which neither legislative draftsmen nor juries may go in concluding that particular material is `patently offensive' within the meaning of the obscenity test set forth in the Miller cases. The Court has referred to this substantive limitation in recent obscenity opinions. See Ward v. Illinois, 431 U.S. 767 (1977); Smith v. United States, 431 U.S. 291 (1977). The question therefore becomes whether the legislature exceeded this substantive constitutional limitation in RSA 650:1 VI (Supp. 1976). This section defines sexual conduct as: [H] uman masturbation, sexual intercourse actual or simulated, normal or perverted, or any touching of the genitals, pubic areas or buttocks of the human male or female, or the breasts of the female, whether alone or between members of the same or opposite sex or between humans and animals, any depiction or representation of excretory functions, any lewd exhibitions of the genitals, flagellation or torture in the context of a sexual relationship. . . . (Emphasis added.) It is the emphasized portion of the above statute which is troublesome. The kinds of sexual conduct therein specified by the legislature are certainly not as tame as the bare midriff example of Mr. Justice Rehnquist in Jenkins v. Georgia, 418 U.S. 153, 161 (1974). However, they are certainly not as hard core as the examples given in Miller and emphasized in Jenkins and Hamling, or the categories of sexual conduct we enumerated in State v. Harding, 114 N.H. 335, 341, 320 A.2d 646, 651 (1974). Such a broad sweep by the legislature can create a chilling effect on protected expression, which is what the Miller court wanted to avoid. [8] We must therefore hold the above-emphasized portion of RSA 650:1 VI (Supp. 1976) as violative of the first and fourteenth amendments of the United States Constitution, and those listed sexual activities must be read out of that section.
Defendant also attacks the statute on the ground that it does not specify the requisite scienter for a conviction. RSA 650:2 (Supp. 1976) (amended by Laws 1977, 199:2) requires that the defendant deliver the obscene material with knowledge of the nature of the contents, and RSA 650:1 II (Supp. 1976) defines knowledge as a general awareness of the nature of the content of the material. The defendant claims this is defective under Hamling v. United States, 418 U.S. 87 (1974), because it does not require specific knowledge of the contents of the material. Defendant cannot seriously be contending that the distributor of an obscene magazine must be shown to have known of every detail of the magazine before he may be convicted. On the other hand, no one can contend that a distributor may be convicted without any requirement of scienter. Smith v. California, 361 U.S. 147 (1959). The amorphous area between these extremes is at issue, but to us this issue is more of semantics than substance. [9] In Mishkin v. State of New York, 383 U.S. 502 (1966), the United States Supreme Court validated the New York Court of Appeals' interpretation that its statute requires the defendant to be in some manner aware of the character of the material. The Supreme Court made reference to Mishkin in Hamling, in which it upheld the trial court's jury instruction that defendant needed to have knowledge of the character of the materials. The Court said that [i]t is constitutionally sufficient that the prosecution show that a defendant had knowledge of the contents of the materials he distributed, and that he knew the character and nature of the materials. Hamling v. United States, 418 U.S. at 123. In light of the definitions of scienter to which the Supreme Court has given approval, we cannot say RSA 650:1 II (Supp. 1976) is unconstitutional. Having a general awareness of the nature of the contents of the material is, in our opinion, the same as being in some manner aware of the character of the material, and having knowledge of the nature, contents, or character of the material. It does not make a defendant absolutely liable, but liable only if he is aware of the nature of the material; the statute is therefore constitutional.