Opinion ID: 1827977
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Definitions of obscenity.

Text: The appellant acknowledges that the jury instruction given here has been previously approved by this court in Court v. State . [26] Notwithstanding this approval, appellant urges this court to adopt the position propounded in Memoirs v. Massachusetts, [27] which held: ... A book cannot be proscribed unless it is found to be utterly without redeeming social value. This is so even though the book is found to possess the requisite prurient appeal and to be patently offensive. Each of the three federal constitutional criteria is to be applied independently; the social value of the book can neither be weighed against nor canceled by its prurient appeal or patent offensiveness. (Emphasis appellant's.) The appellant also contends that the trial court erred because it proffered three separate and distinct definitions of obscenity to the jury. In addition to the standard Roth definition of obscenity, the record indicates that the trial court gave the following alternative definitions of obscenity: Obscenity has also been defined as signifying that form of morality which has relation to sexual impurity and which has a tendency to incite lustful thoughts. It also has been defined as material which has a substantial tendency to deprave or corrupt its readers or viewers by inciting lascivious thoughts or arousing lustful desires. An alternative definition of obscenity, in terms of hard-core pornography, has been given as material which focuses predominantly upon what is sexual, morbid, grossly perverse and bizarre without any artistic or scientific purpose or justification.... It should be noted that the first alternative definition proffered by the trial court is identical to the alternative instruction which was approved in Court v. State . [28] As was pointed out in Court, this alternative instruction is taken from Roth's companion case, Alberts v. California. [29] This court noted that while this alternative instruction did not encompass all of the Roth elements, they are set forth explicitly elsewhere in the instructions, and the jury could not have been misled or the defendant prejudiced by the fact that the single sentence referred to did not encompass all of the elements. [30] This court further pointed out in the Court decision that the jury instructions taken as a whole make it clear that the jury was to be bound by the Roth test.... [31] Perusal of this record adequately indicates that the trial court made it unequivocally clear to the jury that they were bound to the three Roth elements in order to find obscenity.