Court Opinion

ID: 9523401
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 02:41:36.09089+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:05:16.859623
License: Public Domain

Braucher, J.
(dissenting, with whom Reardon and Quirico, JJ., join). According to the court’s opinion in Commonwealth v. Horton, ante, 164, Miller v. California, 413 U. S. 15 (1973), reduces the area of First Amendment protection in the field of obscenity. Perversely, however, this development is held to render invalid applications of the Massachusetts obscenity statutes which would have been valid before the Miller case. The Miller decision, it is said, renders our statutes unconstitutionally vague. In effect (with an inexplicable exception for material “harmful to minors”), the Commonwealth now has no operative obscenity statutes. We disagree.
The court holds our statutes deficient with respect to only one element of the Miller standard: “The applicable State law, ‘as written or authoritatively construed,’ must specifically define the sexual conduct whose depiction or description is interdicted.” Before the Miller case was decided, we had limited the operation of the Massachusetts statutes on the subject to portrayal of “actual sexual congress or other activities commonly known as hard core pornography.” Commonwealth v. Palladino, 358 Mass. 28, 32 (1970). Commonwealth v. Donahue, 358 Mass. 803 (1970). Commonwealth v. Bitsocos, 361 Mass. 859 (1972). See Commonwealth v. Claflin, Mass. App. Ct., (1973).a So limited, the statutes, as “authoritatively construed,” contain the necessary reference to specifically defined sexual conduct. Within the limits set by our past decisions, the Miller case and its companions established no new constitutional obstacles. The Supreme Court of the United States now construes Federal obscenity statutes so *182as to conform to the Miller standard. United States v. 12 200-Ft. Reels of Super 8 MM. Film, 413 U. S. 123, 130, fn. 7 (1973). It clearly indicates that “existing state statutes, as construed heretofore or hereafter, may well be adequate.” Miller v. California, 413 U. S. at 24, fn. 6. We should follow the lead of the Supreme Court of the United States and construe our Massachusetts statutes to conform to the Miller standard.
The opinion of the court does not discuss the specific results they are reaching in the name of “freedom of speech” and the need for “guidance” to our citizens. We think some elaboration is needed. The defendants were convicted of possessing an obscene motion picture film for the purpose of exhibition after the jury had been fully instructed on the basis of the Miller standard. We have viewed the film. After an opening scene in which the heroine commits suicide by slashing her wrists with a razor blade while in a bathtub, most of the film consists of a portrayal of her education in lust during an interval before she is to spend eternity in Hell. The scenes include her anal stimulation by a man with an artificial male organ, coitus and oral and anal copulation with the man, mutual masturbation and oral copulation with another woman, masturbation with fruit, with a snake, and with a hose, simultaneous oral copulation of two women with a man, simultaneous coitus and anal copulation by two men with the heroine, and finally, presumably in Hell, her unsuccessful attempts at seduction and masturbation in front of a disinterested man. The portrayal is explicit and detailed; the accompanying dialogue is explicitly and vulgarly anatomical.
The court indicates that a statute referring to obscene pictures gives no guidance as to the status of the motion picture film involved in this case. The intimation is that an exhibitor might not know whether the film is obscene or not. An “expert” called by the defendant proposed to testify that the film was “a very interesting religious parable.” We think, however, that with or without such expert help a jury could properly find that the film was hard *183core pornography and therefore obscene. Such a finding would not come as a surprise to any competent adult.
Since the court does not discuss other issues raised by the defendant, we do not consider them.

 298 N. E. 2d 888, 889.