Opinion ID: 1988243
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Overbreadth under the Federal Constitution

Text: ¶ 9. Crossroads appropriately makes no serious attempt to argue that the Kenosha Ordinance is at odds with the protections afforded by the First and Fourteenth Amendments under United States Supreme Court precedent in the area of state regulation of obscenity. It is clear from Crossroads' brief that it fundamentally disagrees with that Court's obscenity jurisprudence, but in the end must (and does) admit that for the purposes of its overbreadth claim under the federal constitution, the Kenosha ordinance must be sustained. ¶ 10. The Supreme Court in a line of cases culminating in Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973), then declared categorically settled that obscene material is unprotected by the First Amendment. Id. at 23 (citing Kois v. Wisconsin, 408 U.S. 229 (1972); United States v. Reidel, 402 U.S. 351, 354 (1971); Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476, 485 (1957)); see also Paris Adult Theatre I v. Slaton, 413 U.S. 49, 54 (1973) (This Court has consistently held that obscene material is not protected by the First Amendment as a limitation on the state police power by virtue of the Fourteenth Amendment.) ¶ 11. Acknowledging first the inherent dangers of undertaking to regulate any form of expression, the Court explicitly provided that states could regulate obscene materials so long as their statutes were carefully limited. Miller, 413 U.S. at 23-24. In the Court's view, a carefully limited regulation would be sufficiently protective of First Amendment values applicable to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. Id. Under the tripartite test it then enunciated, a state may regulate materials as obscene if: (a) [] `the average person, applying contemporary community standards' would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, Kois v. Wisconsin, [408 U.S. 229, 230 (1972)], quoting Roth v. United States, [354 U.S. 476, 489 (1957)]; (b) [] the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (c) [] the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. Miller, 413 U.S. at 24-25. ¶ 12. This court has adopted Miller in its evaluations of state obscenity statutes under the federal constitution, see State v. Princess Cinema of Milwaukee, 96 Wis. 2d 646, 292 N.W.2d 807 (1980) (the Miller standard was used to invalidate, for the violation of First Amendment rights, the forerunner to the current Wis. Stat. § 944.21, enacted in 1988), and the standard was recited by this court with approval as recently as 1994. See State v. Thiel, 183 Wis. 2d 505, 523, 515 N.W.2d 847 (1994) (upholding Wis. Stat. § 948.11, Exposing a child to harmful material, as a constitutionally valid adaptation of the Miller obscenity test). ¶ 13. Further, in our assessment of Wis. Stat. § 944.21 under the federal constitution we are bound by Miller, for [w]hen assessing any First Amendment challenge to a state statute, we are bound by the results and interpretations given that amendment by the decisions of the United States Supreme Court. Jackson v. Benson, 218 Wis. 2d 835, 855, 578 N.W.2d 602 (1998) (citing State ex rel. Holt v. Thompson, 66 Wis. 2d 659, 663, 225 N.W.2d 678 (1975)); see also State v. Pitsch, 124 Wis. 2d 628, 632, 369 N.W.2d 711 (1985) (when this court interprets a provision of the federal constitution, this court is bound by the interpretations which the United States Supreme Court has given that provision). Miller therefore governs Crossroads' overbreadth claim under the federal constitution, and it is dispositive. [3] ¶ 14. `A statute is overbroad when its language, given its normal meaning, is so sweeping that its sanctions may be applied to constitutionally protected conduct which the state is not permitted to regulate.' Janssen, 219 Wis. 2d at 374 (quoting Bachowski v. Salamone, 139 Wis. 2d 397, 411, 407 N.W.2d 533 (1987)). We have no doubt that Kenosha County Ordinance § 9.10.2 and Wis. Stat. § 944.21 are not overbroad under the federal constitution, for Miller explicitly permits states to regulate sexually explicit material in the manner in which Kenosha and Wisconsin have done here. ¶ 15. The Miller test has become the basis for many states' obscenity laws, including Wis. Stat. § 944.21 upon which Kenosha County has modeled ordinance § 9.10.2. The Supreme Court offered the Miller test as an example of an appropriate limitation upon a state statute governing obscenity that would withstand constitutional scrutiny. Miller, 413 U.S. at 25 (If a state law that regulates obscene material is [limited by our three-pronged test], the First Amendment values applicable to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment are adequately protected. . . .). Both the Wisconsin statute and Kenosha ordinance are virtual adaptations of the Miller test. ¶ 16. Crossroads has offered no evidence that the Kenosha ordinance deviates, unconstitutionally, from the Miller test. Indeed, Crossroads explicitly acknowledges in its brief that the three-pronged test for `obscenity' [is] incorporated into the Kenosha ordinance. Crossroads' point of contention is its disagreement with the Supreme Court's categorical exclusion of obscene materials from First Amendment protection. However, it also accepts Miller as good law. Under current obscenity statute analysis as found in Miller, the Kenosha County ordinance and Wisconsin statute withstand federal constitutional scrutiny on Crossroads' overbreadth claim, for as currently limiteds, neither reaches speech protected by the First Amendment.