Opinion ID: 109865
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Instruction as to Sensitive Persons

Text: It does not follow, however, as petitioner contends, that the inclusion of sensitive persons in the charge advising the jury of whom the community consists was error. The District Court's charge was: Thus the brochures, magazines and film are not to be judged on the basis of your personal opinion. Nor are they to be judged by their effect on a particularly sensitive or insensitive person or group in the community. You are to judge these materials by the standard of the hypothetical average person in the community, but in determining this average standard you must include the sensitive and the insensitive, in other words, you must include everyone in the community. (Emphasis added.) Petitioner's reliance on passages from Miller, 413 U. S., at 33, and Smith v. United States, supra, at 304, for the proposition that inclusion of sensitive persons in the relevant community was error is misplaced. In Miller we said, [T]he primary concern with requiring a jury to apply the standard of `the average person, applying contemporary community standards' is to be certain that, so far as material is not aimed at a deviant group, it will be judged by its impact on an average person, rather than a particularly susceptible or sensitive personor indeed a totally insensitive one. See Roth v. United States, supra, at 489. This statement was essentially repeated in Smith: [T]he Court has held that § 1461 embodies a requirement that local rather than national standards should be applied. Hamling v. United States, supra . Similarly, obscenity is to be judged according to the average person in the community, rather than the most prudish or the most tolerant. Hamling v. United States, supra ; Miller v. California, supra ; Roth v. United States, 354 U. S. 476 (1957). Both of these substantive limitations are passed on to the jury in the form of instructions. (Footnote omitted.) The point of these passages was to emphasize what was an issue central to Roth, that judging obscenity by the effect of isolated passages upon the most susceptible persons, might well encompass material legitimately treating with sex, and so it must be rejected as unconstitutionally restrictive of the freedoms of speech and press. 354 U. S., at 489. [5] But nothing in those opinions suggests that sensitive and insensitive persons, however defined, are to be excluded from the community as a whole for the purpose of deciding if materials are obscene. In the narrow and limited context of this case, the community includes all adults who constitute it, and a jury can consider them all in determining relevant community standards. The vice is in focusing upon the most susceptible or sensitive members when judging the obscenity of materials, not in including them along with all others in the community. See Mishkin v. New York, 383 U. S. 502, 508-509 (1966). Petitioner relies also on Hamling v. United States, 418 U. S. 87 (1974), to support his argument. Like Miller and Smith, supra, though, Hamling merely restated the by now familiar rule that jurors are not to base their decision about the materials on their personal opinion, nor by its effect on a particularly sensitive or insensitive person or group. 418 U. S., at 107. It is clear the trial court did not instruct the jury to focus on sensitive persons or groups. It explicitly said the jury should not use sensitive persons as a standard, and emphasized that in determining the average person standard the jury must include the sensitive and the insensitive, in other words . . . everyone in the community. The difficulty of framing charges in this area is well recognized. But the term average person as used in this charge means what it usually means, and is no less clear than reasonable person used for generations in other contexts. Cf. Hamling v. United States, supra, at 104-105. Cautionary instructions to avoid subjective personal and private views in determining community standards can do no more than tell the individual juror that in evaluating the hypothetical average person he is to determine the collective view of the community, as best as it can be done. Simon E. Sobeloff, then Solicitor General, later Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, very aptly stated the dilemma: Is the so-called definition of negligence really a definition? What could be fuzzier than the instruction to the jury that negligence is a failure to observe that care which would be observed by a `reasonable man'a chimerical creature conjured up to give an aura of definiteness where definiteness is not possible. . . . Every man is likely to think of himself as the happy exemplification of `the reasonable man'; and so the standard he adopts in order to fulfill the law's prescription will resemble himself, or what he thinks he is, or what he thinks he should be, even if he is not. All these shifts and variations of his personal norm will find reflection in the verdict. The whole business is necessarily equivocal. This we recognize, but we are reconciled to the impossibility of discovering any form of words that will ring with perfect clarity and be automatically self-executing. Alas, there is no magic push-button in this or in other branches of the law. (Emphasis added.) [6] However one defines sensitive or insensitive persons, they are part of the community. The contention that the instruction was erroneous because it included sensitive persons is therefore without merit.