Opinion ID: 1367422
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: the new miller standard

Text: In Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15, 93 S.Ct. 2607, 37 L.Ed.2d 419 (1973), [18] the Supreme Court reviewed a California statute which had been interpreted in light of the above-enumerated criteria. Mr. Chief Justice Burger, writing for the majority, reconsidered and repudiated the Roth-Memoirs' test: . . . . But now the Memoirs test has been abandoned as unworkable by its author, and no Member of the Court today supports the Memoirs formulation. Miller v. California, supra . The Supreme Court expressed its dissatisfaction with the third prong of the prior test, which: . . . called on the prosecution to prove a negative, i.e., that the material was `utterly without redeeming social value'a burden virtually impossible to discharge under our criminal standards of proof. Miller v. California, supra . Acknowledging that the regulation of any form of expression was inherently dangerous, the Supreme Court, in Miller, required that [s]tate statutes designed to regulate obscene materials must be carefully limited. The permissible scope of such regulation was confined to works which depict or describe sexual conduct, and: [t]hat conduct must be specifically defined by the applicable state law, as written or authoritatively construed. Miller v. California, supra . A new set of standards was then announced by the Supreme Court for the purpose of identifying obscene material: (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. See Miller v. California, supra . The Supreme Court also attempted to clarify part (b) of the standards by adopting the catch-all term hard core: Under the holdings announced today, no one will be subject to prosecution for the sale or exposure of obscene materials unless these materials depict or describe patently offensive `hard core' sexual conduct specifically defined by the regulating state law, as written or construed. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court was less than munificient in giving state courts and legislatures examples of the kind of hard core pornography a state statute could lawfully regulate under part (b) of the enumerated standards. However, the following two examples were suggested by the Supreme Court in Miller: (a) Patently offensive representations or descriptions of ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated. (b) Patently offensive representations or descriptions of masturbation, excretory functions, and lewd exhibition of the genitals. The tools for precise analysis were further blunted by the Supreme Court's discussion of community standards. Rejecting what it considered hypothetical and unascertainable `national standards,' the Court, in Miller, reasoned: It is neither realistic nor constitutionally sound to read the First Amendment as requiring that the people of Maine or Mississippi accept public depiction of conduct found tolerable in Las Vegas, or New York City. . . . People in different States vary in their tastes and attitudes, and this diversity is not to be strangled by the absolutism of imposed uniformity. The Supreme Court offered no further guidance as to the boundaries of the more localized community under the new standards. Whether those boundaries are coexistent with those of the state, a county, or a municipality remains undecided by the Supreme Court. The problem with this approach is that in laying to rest the evanescent national standard, the Supreme Court has expounded a new standard hardly less cryptic, and based upon the impulses of not one, but possibly thousands of undefined and illusive local communities. For the reasons stated in our companion case of People v. Tabron, Colo., 544 P.2d 380 (announced January 5, 1976), we feel that nothing less than a state-wide standard is feasible in the interpretation of a state statute.