Opinion ID: 109865
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Instruction as to Children

Text: Petitioner challenges that part of the jury instruction which read: In determining community standards, you are to consider the community as a whole, young and old, educated and uneducated, the religious and the irreligious, men, women and children, from all walks of life. (Emphasis added.) The Court of Appeals concluded that the inclusion of children was unnecessary and that it would prefer that children be excluded from the court's [jury] instruction until the Supreme Court clearly indicates that inclusion is proper. 551 F. 2d, at 1158. It correctly noted that this Court had been ambivalent on this point, having sustained the conviction in Roth, supra, where the instruction included children, and having intimated later in Ginzburg v. United States, 383 U. S. 463, 465 n. 3 (1966), that it did not necessarily approve the inclusion of children as part of the community instruction. [3] Reviewing the charge as a whole under the traditional standard of review, cogent arguments can be made that the inclusion of children was harmless error, see Hamling v. United States, 418 U. S. 87, 107 (1974); however, the courts, the bar, and the public are entitled to greater clarity than is offered by the ambiguous comment in Ginzburg on this score. Since this is a federal prosecution under an Act of Congress, we elect to take this occasion to make clear that children are not to be included for these purposes as part of the community as that term relates to the obscene materials proscribed by 18 U. S. C. § 1461 (1976 ed.). Cf. Cupp v. Naughten, 414 U. S. 141, 146 (1973). Earlier in the same Term in which Roth was decided, the Court had reversed a conviction under a state statute which made criminal the dissemination of a book found to have a potentially deleterious influence on youth. Butler v. Michigan, 352 U. S. 380, 383 (1957). The statute was invalidated because its incidence . . . is to reduce the adult population . . . to reading only what is fit for children. Ibid. The instruction given here, when read as a whole, did not have an effect so drastic as the Butler statute. But it may well be that a jury conscientiously striving to define the relevant community of persons, the average person, Smith v. United States, 431 U. S. 291, 304 (1977), by whose standards obscenity is to be judged, would reach a much lower average when children are part of the equation than it would if it restricted its consideration to the effect of allegedly obscene materials on adults. Cf. Ginsberg v. New York, 390 U. S. 629 (1968). There was no evidence that children were the intended recipients of the materials at issue here, or that petitioner had reason to know children were likely to receive the materials. Indeed, an affirmative representation was made that children were not involved in this case. [4] We therefore conclude it was error to instruct the jury that they were a part of the relevant community, and accordingly the conviction cannot stand.