Opinion ID: 1234691
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Fourth Ferber Factor

Text: The fourth Ferber factor is that the value of the prohibited speech is exceedingly modest, if not de minimis.  [11] 458 U.S. at 762, 102 S.Ct. 3348; see also Chaplinsky, 315 U.S. at 572, 62 S.Ct. 766. The Government finds support for the low value of the speech restricted by the Act by pointing to the exceptions clause of 18 U.S.C. § 48(b). Section (b) states that the Act does not apply to any depiction that has serious religious, political, scientific, educational, journalistic, historical, or artistic value. The House Committee Report viewed these categories as broad. [12] Still, just how broad these categories actually are is subject to debate because most of the legislative history focuses on the depiction of animal cruelty for prurient purposes in so-called crush videos. [13] The exceptions clause cannot on its own constitutionalize § 48. The exceptions clause in this case is a variation of the third prong of the Miller obscenity test. This prong asks whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15, 24, 93 S.Ct. 2607, 37 L.Ed.2d 419 (1973); see also Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 535 U.S. at 246-47, 122 S.Ct. 1389. As one scholar has stated, [i]t has long been a principle of adult obscenity law that no matter how shocking or how offensive a sexually explicit work might otherwise be, it should be protected speech if it demonstrates serious artistic value. Adler, supra, at 967. The role of the clause in Miller cannot be divorced from the first two parts of the obscenity test, which emphasize patent offensiveness and an appeal to the prurient interest. This type of exceptions clause has not been applied in non-prurient unprotected speech cases, and taking it out of this context ignores the essential framework of the Miller test. Congress and the Government would have the statute operate in such a way as to permit the restriction of otherwise constitutional speech so long as part of the statute allows for an exception for speech that has serious value. The problem with this view is twofold. First, outside of patently offensive speech that appeals to the prurient interest, the First Amendment does not require speech to have serious value in order for it to fall under the First Amendment umbrella. What this view overlooks is the great spectrum between speech utterly without social value and high value speech. Second, if the mere appendage of an exceptions clause serves to constitutionalize § 48, it is difficult to imagine what category of speech the Government could not regulate through similar statutory engineering. That is not a road down which this Court is willing to proceed. In sum, the speech restricted by 18 U.S.C. § 48 is protected by the First Amendment. The attempted analogy to Ferber fails because of the inherent differences between children and animals. Those profound differences require no further explication here.