Opinion ID: 109401
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Effect of the Obscenity Determination in Civil Proceedings on the Criminal Proceeding

Text: Accepting as I must for present purposes the Court's current view of the constitutional permissibility of laws forbidding the dissemination of obscene materials, I do not perceive any constitutional defect in a State's criminalizing the knowing sale of material judicially determined to be obscene, provided, of course, that obscenity was determined beyond a reasonable doubt at a proceeding in which the accused was a party and of which he received adequate notice. [5] However, one problem with such a scheme deserves comment. Under prevailing constitutional doctrine, material cannot be proscribed unless, inter alia,  `the average person, applying contemporary community standards' would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest . . . [and] describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law. Miller v. California, supra, at 24 (emphasis supplied). Community standards are inherently in a state of flux, and there is a substantial danger that a civil proceeding declaring given printed matter obscene will forever preclude its introduction into the community, even if the community would no longer view it as patently offensive or appealing to the prurient interest. Some of the most celebrated works of our generation would likely have been the pornography of a prior generation. Thus, I would require that, at a minimum, a person charged with dissemination of material knowing it to have been judicially determined to be obscene in a civil proceeding to which he was a party should be permitted to interject into the criminal trial a claim that community standards had evolved from the time of the civil proceeding to the time the acts for which he was charged were committed. If there is some colorable showing of such a change, I believe that the First Amendment and due process would require that the State again demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt, in the criminal proceeding, that the material was contemporaneously constitutionally obscene. Cf. Mullaney v. Wilbur, 421 U. S. 684 (1975). [6]