Opinion ID: 768307
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: The State Criminal-Exposure Statute

Text: 96 Having foregone regulation by licensing, the City intends for the police physically to prevent Tunick and his models from engaging in the photo shoot on the grounds that it will violate 245.01 and 245.02 of the New York State Penal Law. Section 245.01 provides: 97 A person is guilty of exposure if he appears in a public place in such a manner that the private or intimate parts of his body are unclothed or exposed. 98 N.Y. Penal Law 245.01. More meaningfully for Tunick, who does not plan to doff his clothing in order to take the photographs, Penal Law 245.02 provides: 99 A person is guilty of promoting the exposure of a person when he knowingly conducts, maintains, owns, manages, operates or furnishes any public premise or place where a person in a public place appears in such a manner that the private or intimate parts of his body are unclothed or exposed. 100 N.Y. Penal Law 245.02. But each of these statutes also contains an exception that may cover Tunick's planned photo shoot: [T]his section shall not apply to the breastfeeding of infants or to any person entertaining or performing in a play, exhibition, show or entertainment. Indeed, Tunick's view is not that this exception may apply to his photo shoot, but that it unquestionably does. According to his counsel, this statutory language, which is totally clear and completely unambiguous on its face, Tr. Oral Arg. at 25, permits that which Tunick proposes to do. 101 The statute gives cities, towns and villages the power to opt out of the exception insofar as it applies to expressive activity, thus allowing such municipalities to enact local laws prohibiting public nudity irrespective of its artistic purpose. N.Y. Penal Law 245.01 and 245.02. 4 While such a local law would render Tunick's planned activity plainly illegal, leaving the issue of whether the prohibition meets First Amendment standards, New York City has chosen not to adopt one. Indeed, New York's licensing authority has deliberately permitted nude photography in public places from time to time. 102 The City has thus both abandoned Tunick's lack of a permit as a basis on which to prevent his planned photo shoot and declined or failed to adopt an ordinance that would make it explicitly unlawful. It has nonetheless decided that despite the statute's exception for artistic activities what Tunick proposes to do is prohibited by 245.01 and 245.02. According to the City, people posing naked in the public streets for the purpose of having their photograph taken for eventual display elsewhere, using the street as a set rather than a forum, 5 are not performing in a play, exhibition, show or entertainment. Neither the plain meaning of the statute, the decision of a New York appellate court, nor any other means by which we might determine the statute's reach is available - to us or to the New York City Police Department - to determine whether the City is right. 103 In my view, the arrest of Tunick by the police under a statute that does not clearly make his artistic expression unlawful prior to that expression taking place presents the same kind of peril for freedom of expression as does the refusal of a licensing authority to grant a permit under a similarly unclear statute. Unguided by a plain statutory command, the police can permit or restrain Tunick's expression before it occurs for reasons of their own. When a government license is involved, a law subjecting the exercise of First Amendment freedoms to the prior restraint of a license, without narrow, objective, and definite standards to guide the licensing authority, is unconstitutional. Shuttlesworth, 394 U.S. at 150-51 (footnote containing citations omitted). I do not see why subjecting the exercise of First Amendment freedoms to a prior restraint imposed by the police, without narrow, objective, and definite standards to guide the police, is any the more permissible. This variation on the classic theme of censorship is, it seems to me, also foreclosed by the First Amendment. 104 Police censorship is, if anything, more dangerous than a licensing system. It is pure force unaccompanied by the procedural safeguards that are a constitutionally mandated part of a viable licensing plan. See, e.g., Beal v. Stern, 184 F.3d 117, 128 (2d Cir. 1999). 6 I do not think that law enforcement officials may stop expressive activity before it begins absent a clear statute making the activity illegal. The police operate under no such clear mandate here. 105 In sum, the City's arrest of Tunick and his models would prevent his expression. It would thus be a prior restraint and as such has special constitutional significance. As the Supreme Court has explained: 106 A criminal penalty or a judgment . . . is subject to the whole panoply of protections afforded by deferring the impact of the judgment until all avenues of appellate review have been exhausted. Only after judgment has become final, correct or otherwise, does the law's sanction become fully operative. 107 A prior restraint, by contrast and by definition, has an immediate and irreversible sanction. If it can be said that a threat of criminal or civil sanctions after publication chills speech, prior restraint freezes it at least for the time. 108 Nebraska Press Ass'n, 427 U.S. at 559 (citing Alexander M. Bickel, The Morality of Consent 61 (1975)) (footnote omitted). The prohibition of prior restraints has been understood for centuries to be central to the guarantee of freedom of expression. See Near v. Minnesota, 283 U.S. 697, 713-14 (1931). The [Supreme] Court has emphasized that '[a] system of prior restraints of expression comes to [the courts] bearing a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity.' Carroll v. President & Comm'rs of Princess Anne, 393 U.S. 175, 181 (1968)(quoting Bantam Books v. Sullivan, 372 U.S. 58, 70 (1963) and Freedman v. Maryland, 380 U.S. 51, 57 (1965)) (second alteration in the original). There is no basis for a finding that that fundamental presumption has been overcome here.