Opinion ID: 1775238
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Violent Materials

Text: Appellees next contend that La.R.S. 14:106 is unconstitutionally overbroad because it purports to regulate purely violent materials. La.R.S. 14:106(A)(6) provides: The crime of obscenity is the intentional:    Advertisement, exhibition or display of violent material. `Violent material' is any tangible work or thing which the trier of facts determines depicts actual or simulated patently offensive acts of violence, including but not limited to, acts depicting sadistic conduct, whippings, beatings, torture and mutilation of the human body. In Miller v. California, supra , the United States Supreme Court declared    State statutes designed to regulate obscene materials must be carefully limited.    As a result, we now confine the permissible scope of such regulation to works which depict or describe sexual conduct. That conduct must be specifically defined by the applicable state law, as written or authoritatively construed. A state offense must also be limited to works which, taken as a whole, appeal to the prurient interest in sex, which portray sexual conduct in a patently offensive way, and which, taken as a whole, do not have serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. 413 U.S. at 23-24, 93 S.Ct. at 2614-15, 37 L.Ed.2d at 430-31 (emphasis supplied). Unquestionably, La.R.S. 14:106(A)(6), which facially purports to proscribe patently offensive violent materials, exceeds the limits placed upon the regulation of obscene materials by the United States Supreme Court in Miller. Appellees, however, were not charged with dissemination of violent materials. Each was charged with exhibiting and displaying hard core sexual materialsconduct condemned by La.R.S. 14:106(A)(2) and (3). [2] Furthermore, for the reasons stated above pertaining to the last clause of La.R.S. 14:106(C), the severability clause of the act would also allow paragraph (A)(6) to be eliminated from the statute. Assuming the invalidity of La.R.S. 14:106(A)(6), we see no reason to declare the entire statute invalid.