Opinion ID: 2735164
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Brune’s Challenge

Text: With these principles in mind, the first step in analyzing an overbreadth challenge is to “construe the challenged statute; it is impossible to determine whether a statute reaches too far without first knowing what the statute covers.” Williams, 553 U.S. at 293. And even if the statute does reach some “protected expression, facial invalidation is inappropriate if the remainder of the statute . . . covers a whole range of easily identifiable and constitutionally proscribable . . . conduct . . . .” Osborne, 495 U.S. at 112 (alteration in the original) (internal citation and quotation marks omitted); see also Hoffman Estates v. Flipside, -15- Hoffman Estates, Inc., 455 U.S. 489, 494 (1982) (“In a facial challenge to the overbreadth and vagueness of a law, a court’s first task is to determine whether the enactment reaches a substantial amount of constitutionally protected conduct. If it does not, then the overbreadth challenge must fail.” (footnote omitted)). Section 2252A(a)(5)(B) punishes the (1) knowing possession of, or accessing with the intent to view, (2) any print material, film, or computer media, (3) containing an image of child pornography: Any person who . . . knowingly possesses, or knowingly accesses with intent to view, any book, magazine, periodical, film, videotape, computer disk, or any other material that contains an image of child pornography . . . . 18 U.S.C. § 2252A(a)(5)(B). 6 The parties agree on much. In particular, they agree that the statute requires an offender to meet at least the following elements: (1) he must knowingly access some proscribed material; (2) he must intend to view that material; and (3) he must know that the material contains an image of child pornography. Brune, however, argues that the statute’s overbreadth is revealed by both its failure to specify that the defendant “inten[d] to view” the images of child 6 Although it is not at issue in this case, the statute makes clear that the government must also prove “the child pornography has been mailed, or shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce.” United States v. Sturm, 672 F.3d 891, 897 (10th Cir. 2012) (en banc) (quotation marks omitted). -16- pornography directly, and its use of the potentially far-reaching catchall “any other material.” We examine, and reject, each contention.
Brune contends the statute is unconstitutionally overbroad since it does not require that the offender specifically intend to view an image of child pornography. As we highlighted above, our review of the statutory text starts with a fair and commonsense assessment of the statute’s reach. United States v. Stevens, 559 U.S. 460, 485 (2010) (reviewing animal cruelty statute). “[A] court should not invalidate a statute on its face simply because [it] may criminalize some protected speech.” Ward v. Utah, 398 F.3d 1239, 1247 (10th Cir. 2005). Rather, we must guard that we do not “go beyond the statute’s facial requirements and speculate about ‘hypothetical’ or ‘imaginary’ cases.” Wash. State Grange, 552 U.S. at 450–51. But still we must also indulge “a judicial prediction or assumption that the statute’s very existence may cause others not before the court to refrain from constitutionally protected speech or expression.” Broadrick, 413 U.S. at 612. It is Brune’s burden to show, “‘from the text of [the law] and from actual fact,’ that substantial overbreadth exists.” Hicks, 539 U.S. at 122 (alterations in the original) (quoting N.Y. State Club Ass’n., Inc. v. City of New York, 487 U.S. 1, 14 (1988)); see also Members of City Council v. Taxpayers for Vincent, 466 U.S. 789, 801 (1984) (“[T]here must be a realistic danger that the statute itself will -17- significantly compromise recognized First Amendment protections of parties not before the Court for it to be facially challenged on overbreadth grounds.”). For a challenger to carry this burden, he must identify protected materials that would be inevitably targeted by the statute. See Faustin v. City & County of Denver, 423 F.3d 1192, 1201 (10th Cir. 2005) (“[I]n this case Faustin has presented no evidence and made no showing that Denver’s policy has ever been applied to prohibit any expression on [highway] overpasses other than [clearly proscribable speech] or that Denver’s policy has ever been so broadly interpreted by the public in a way that it has chilled any such speech.”); see also United States v. Sayer, 748 F.3d 425, 435–36 (1st Cir. 2014); United States v. Dean, 635 F.3d 1200, 1206 (11th Cir. 2011). Indeed, overbreadth exists where a challenger can point to “actual fact[s]” that would permit unconstitutional applications of the statute. N.Y. State Club Ass’n., 487 U.S. at 14 (rejecting an overbreadth challenge where the appellant failed to create a record of existent clubs to which the statute would be unconstitutionally applied in violation of the First Amendment). This requires a “statute’s application to real-world conduct, not fanciful hypotheticals.” Stevens, 559 U.S. at 485 (Alito, J., dissenting). The Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Stevens is instructive. In that case, the defendant attacking the statute demonstrated that “depictions of ordinary and lawful activities . . . constitute the vast majority of materials subject -18- to the statute.” Stevens, 559 U.S. at 473 (emphasis added). 7 By contrast, Brune has not described examples of constitutionally valuable speech that might be punishable under the statute as he interprets it. He provides no specific examples, and his hypotheticals fall short of establishing that a considerable amount of speech subject to the statute is deserving of protection. For example, Brune argues the statute might theoretically reach a 500-page book containing a great deal of protected speech and a single image of child pornography. Reply Br. at 8. But in the end, “the mere fact that one can conceive of some impermissible applications of a statute is not sufficient to render it susceptible to an overbreadth challenge.” Taxpayers for Vincent, 466 U.S. at 800. To deny Brune’s overbreadth challenge, therefore, we need not decide, as he suggests, if an individual with no specific intent to view the image of child pornography itself can be punished under the statute. 8 Read either way, the statute is not overbroad. It is enough that, on the record before us, we see no evidence that the impermissible applications of § 2252A(a)(5)(B), to the extent 7 In Stevens, the challengers of the statute submitted extensive documentation of actual movies, magazines, and books that would be subject to the statute despite their social, artistic, and literary value. See generally Br. for Respondent, United States v. Stevens, 559 U.S. 460 (2010) (No. 08-769), 2009 WL 2191081. 8 We note that in many ways Brune’s reading of the statute is grammatically superior to the government’s. Still, Brune’s argument fails because, even accepting his reading, the statute is not unconstitutionally overbroad because its legitimate sweep far exceeds its impermissible applications. -19- any exist, are substantial in comparison to the unprotected, criminal speech that the statute unquestionably covers. This is not to say that Brune’s construction of the statute is frivolous or unjustifiable; but it is to say that his offered interpretations do little to expose the overbreadth of the statute in either an absolute or relative sense. See, e.g., Board of Trustees of State Univ. of N.Y. v. Fox, 492 U.S. 469, 485 (1989). And read contextually, we are convinced the statute’s meaning is readily understandable and not overbroad. 9 9 The thrust of the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on child pornography strengthens our conclusion. As previously emphasized, child pornography is a category of speech unworthy of First Amendment protection. Brown v. Entm’t Merchs. Ass’n, 131 S. Ct. 2729, 2763 (2011) (comparing the categorical prohibition on child pornography to less absolute areas of unprotected speech). Furthermore, the Court has consistently recognized that statutes banning the possession of child pornography are not chiefly aimed at shielding citizens from the content of the speech itself. See Osborne, 495 U.S. at 109–10. Instead, the harms underlying the creation of child pornography (including child sexual abuse), the economic motives for its production, and the market-making effects engendered by its existence all raise compelling concerns that justify congressional prohibitions on the production and possession of child pornography. See Paroline v. United States, 134 S. Ct. 1710, 1717 (2014); see also Osborne, 495 U.S. at 109–11; Ferber, 458 U.S. at 757–60. With these considerations in mind, § 2252A(a)(5)(B) is sufficiently tailored to support valid congressional interests without overreaching to circumscribe substantial amounts of protected speech. Nor does Ashcroft not change the result. In that case, the Supreme Court struck down portions of a federal child pornography statute, finding that a ban on virtual child pornography was unconstitutionally overbroad because those depictions cultivate only contingent and indirect harm to minors. Ashcroft, 535 U.S. at 250. Not so here. Section 2252A(a)(5)(B)’s target is materials containing actual depictions of child pornography, which indisputably breed the collection of harms that Congress reasonably seeks to eradicate. -20- In sum, we see no grounds for administering the “strong medicine” of overbreadth invalidation to § 2252A(a)(5)(B) because Brune cannot show substantial overbreadth in either an absolute or relative sense.
Brune’s second effort to establish overbreadth is likewise insufficient. He argues that the phrase “any other material” is expansive and possibly limitless. He claims the phrase sweeps into the statute’s orbit broad categories of media protected by the First Amendment. Aplt. Br. at 26–28 (“Unlike a book or movie – ‘Material,’ when such a term includes a web site or other internet based products, does not have a beginning and an end. It is not self-contained.”). Taken to its extreme, Brune’s position is that the statute potentially criminalizes all Internet access. When viewed in isolation, it is difficult to dispute that “any other material” might be susceptible to several meanings—the nominal form of the word “material” is a flexible term that defies singular description. 10 But no statute is an island unto itself. We can look around to provide substance and context to a potentially unclear term. See Tyler v. Cain, 533 U.S. 656, 662 (2001) (“We do not . . . construe the meaning of statutory terms in a vacuum.”). Since Congress 10 It is likely that Congress intended “any other material” to remain somewhat vague in order to encapsulate a multitude of objects that could not be comprehensively and individually listed out. See Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner, Reading Law 33 (1st ed. 2012). -21- has left undefined the word “material” and the phrase “any other material” in the statute, we give the terms their “ordinary meaning.” Kouichi Taniguchi v. Kan. Pac. Saipan, Ltd., 132 S. Ct. 1997, 2002 (2012). An inquiry into a statutory term’s meaning must consider the ordinary, contemporary meaning at the time Congress enacted the statute. BedRoc Ltd. v. United States, 541 U.S. 176, 184 (2004). Unlike many instances, simply resorting to a dictionary definition in this case is not especially helpful. The multiple definitions of “material” preclude an obvious, unitary usage. 11 Nevertheless, the possibility that several workable definitions of “material” can properly imbue the statute does not lead to an expansive reading of this term. In fact, the reverse is true as we are required to construe a phrase within a statute with reference to its accompanying words “in order to avoid the giving of unintended breadth to the Acts of Congress.” Jarecki v. G. D. Searle & Co., 367 U.S. 303, 307 (1961). To this end, any lingering doubt about the limiting principle applicable to the residual phrase “any other material” is quickly satisfied by scrutinizing intrinsic statutory aids. First of all, the wording of the statute invites the application of the canon of construction of ejusdem generis: when “general words 11 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, for example, offers more than five nominal definitions of “material,” almost all of which could conceivably—albeit some more fittingly than others—apply to the statutory text. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary 1392 (1986). -22- follow specific words in a statutory enumeration, the general words are construed to embrace only objects similar in nature to those objects enumerated by the preceding specific words.” Circuit City Stores, Inc. v. Adams, 532 U.S. 105, 114–15 (2001) (quoting 2A Norman J. Singer, Sutherland on Statutes and Statutory Construction § 47.17 (5th ed. 1991)). Stated another way, when a broad reading of an undefined term serves to undermine Congress’s decision to specifically list items that the statute covers, then the undefined term can only be defined with reference to the items that precede it. Applied to § 2252A(a)(5)(B), ejusdem generis advises that “any other material” should be construed as like in kind to, and no more expansive in scope than, “book, magazine, periodical, film, videotape, [and] computer disk.” Those terms denote specific, concrete forms of media that are used to capture, store, or deliver information as a means of communication. They are tangible illustrations of media, rather than mediums themselves. Brune’s assertion that such a definition creates an effective ban on the Internet is incorrect for this very reason. 12 The Internet is the medium; content available on the Internet, including, at a minimum, downloadable digitized images of child pornography from unique 12 The government does not help in arguing the statute is limited to only “webpages” in the Internet context. That term is vague itself and provides little guidance as to what types of Internet material would be subject to the statute. Because it is unnecessary to do so for the statute to survive Brune’s overbreadth attack, we decline to interpret the statute in the manner suggested by the government. -23- uniform resource locators (URLs), are the specific type of media that the statute targets. 13 In addition, as between multiple reasonable interpretations of a statute, we will always prefer one that sustains constitutionality to one that does not under the presumption of constitutional validity. NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., 301 U.S. 1, 30 (1937) (“The cardinal principle of statutory construction is to save and not to destroy.”). In fact, “every reasonable construction must be resorted to, in order to save a statute from unconstitutionality.” Nat’l Fed’n of Indep. Bus. v. Sebelius, 132 S. Ct. 2566, 2594 (2012) (quoting Hooper v. California, 155 U.S. 648, 657 (1895)). Here, reading the definition of “any other material” expansively, as Brune would have it, implicitly eviscerates the statute’s element of scienter and criminalizes otherwise innocent conduct—a reading that smacks of overbreadth. See United States v. X-Citement Video, Inc., 513 U.S. 64, 13 As we explained in United States v. Dobbs, downloadable images on the Internet are automatically stored to a computer’s cache when a person visits a URL on the Internet. 629 F.3d 1199, 1201–02 (10th Cir. 2011). One might argue that this fact presents an overbreadth problem with respect to § 2252A(a)(5)(B) for the careless Internet user who stumbles across a URL containing images of child pornography. But the government still must prove that the defendant “knowingly” accessed that URL. Without a “pattern of child-pornography-related searches immediately preceding the creation of illegal images in the cache,” or similarly sufficient evidence, the government would have difficulty showing the knowing access of “material.” See id. at 1205. As further protection against this scenario, and as we have already addressed, Brune concedes that the statute requires the offender to “know” that the “material” contains images of child pornography. See supra at 16. -24- 70 (1994). Most users of the Internet are likely aware that child pornography exists on the Internet. Under Brune’s broad interpretation of the statute, these innocuous Internet patrons, fully aware that the “Internet” contains child pornography somewhere in its disreputable underworld, would form the necessary intent to violate the statute the moment they logged on to access the Internet. That is not an obvious interpretation of the text, and reading it that way violates our duty to interpret a statute “where fairly possible so as to avoid substantial constitutional questions.” Id. at 69; see also Clark v. Martinez, 543 U.S. 371, 381 (2005) (“[Constitutional avoidance] is a tool for choosing between competing plausible interpretations of a statutory text, resting on the reasonable presumption that Congress did not intend the alternative which raises serious constitutional doubts.”). So, to ensure that the statute maintains the broadly applicable scienter element required of a criminal statute, see Morissette v. United States, 342 U.S. 246, 263 (1952), it is necessary to understand “any other material” as something more precise than the “Internet.” This limiting construction seems obvious from the statutory text, but, in the least, § 2252A(a)(5)(B) is “readily susceptible” to our interpretation and no “rewriting” is required to get there. See Stevens, 559 U.S. at 481. 14 14 In the vagueness context, which overlaps significantly with overbreadth, “[i]t has long been [the Supreme Court’s] practice . . . before striking a federal -25- Because the Internet as a whole is not a “material” within the meaning of § 2252A(a)(5)(B), the degree to which the catchall provision must be further tapered is beyond the scope of an overbreadth challenge. Put simply, once the Internet is excluded from the tagalong phrase, “any other material,” Brune’s overbreadth challenge to the statute falls flat, regardless of what other materials are included within that phrase. Furthermore, there is no “realistic danger” that the statute as written will significantly chill protected speech, and we have not been made aware of any cases where the government has targeted innocent Internet browsing or related activity under this statute. See Williams, 553 U.S. at 302. As a medium, the Internet has undoubtedly generated some complications in ascertaining the precise contours of the First Amendment in an age of technology that is constantly changing and difficult to define. Cf. Sturm, 672 F.3d at 901 (examining the extent to which “visual depictions” of child pornography refer to the substantive content of the image or a particular item containing that image for the purpose of establishing a federal jurisdictional nexus). Accordingly, and particularly in the context of child pornography, Congress and the Supreme Court have engaged in an ongoing effort to strike a careful balance between safeguarding constitutionally protected speech and statute as impermissibly vague, to consider whether the prescription is amenable to a limiting construction.” Skilling v. United States, 561 U.S. 358, 405 (2010). -26- enforcing legitimate criminal laws. See, e.g., Williams, 553 U.S. at 292–93. That careful balance is not disrupted by § 2252A(a)(5)(B) because, again, any protected speech that falls under the ambit of the statute is insubstantial in comparison to its plainly legitimate sweep. Brune has not sufficiently met his burden to demonstrate otherwise.