Court Opinion

ID: 9460290
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 21:46:36.194556+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:36:33.599230
License: Public Domain

OAKES, Circuit Judge
(dissenting):
I dissent.
I agree with Parts I, II and III of the majority opinion in this case. I disagree, however, with Part IV relating to “community standards.”
Chief Judge Mishler’s instructions to the jury failed to define by what community standards the alleged obscenity in this case was to be judged—regional, statewide, districtwide, citywide, boroughwide or neighborhoodwide—and all of these alternatives are open. Rather, the instructions referred to the “community as a whole”—what community he did not say. At the time of trial most people thought, and objection to the charge was made on this basis, that the national community established the controlling standard. See Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184, 193, 84 S.Ct. 1676, 12 L.Ed. 793 (1964). The Supreme Court has now made it tolerably clear that, indeed, the test of obscenity is to be determined by the standards of the community of the triers-of-fact, Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15, 30-34, 93 S.Ct. 2607, 37 L.Ed.2d 419 (1973), so that Chief Judge Mishler cannot be faulted in this respect; indeed, he may have anticipated the Miller case by refusing to charge national standards. The Supreme Court has not yet told us, however, what is meant by the community of the triers-of-fact or if this is some objective test relating to the views of others in their community or some subjective test relating to their state of mind.
Regardless of our being left somewhat in the dark by the Supreme Court, regardless of what we appellate judges may think of the nature of the materials1 the transportation of which *915in interstate commerce is charged as illegal—and for this purpose one may assume indeed in Judge Mulligan’s typically amusing phrase that even a community’s “zoological gardens” would treat the material here in question to be “obscene, lewd, lascivious and filthy” under the words of the statutes—a defendant is entitled to a determination of guilt or innocence by a jury under proper instructions by the court. United States v. Fields, 466 F.2d 119 (2d Cir. 1972). See also Bollenbach v. United States, 326 U.S. 607, 613-614, 66 S.Ct. 402, 90 L.Ed. 350 (1946); Screws v. United States, 325 U.S. 91, 101, 65 S.Ct. 1031, 89 L.Ed. 1495 (1945); United States v. Clark, 475 F.2d 240, 248-251 (2d Cir. 1973). This, indeed, is what a jury trial is all about. Even contemptible purveyors of “hardcore” pornography are entitled to proper instructions by the court when being tried for a criminal offense by a jury. Moreover, tomorrow it may be someone else who is being tried for the same offense. And that someone may be a theater (or a bookstore), a producer or director, even an artist.
We are in an area where freedom of expression and its converse, freedom of consumption of thought or what I would call freedom of reception, is ultimately involved. It is unfortunate that principles sometimes have to be established in cases involving those who would abuse these or other basic freedoms including those who would purvey so-called hardcore pornography to a willing, if—at least among the denizens of the older generation—an overly prurient, public. But we must be very careful lest the principles established in cases such as this one be permitted to make substantial encroachment upon freedom of expression or, as I say, its converse, freedom of reception. Only the other day the Supreme Court granted certiorari in Jenkins v. Georgia, 414 U.S. 1090, 94 S.Ct. 719, 38 L.Ed.2d 547 (1973), where a local community—in that case, a town— determined the movie “Carnal Knowledge” to be obscene. There is here so much at stake that it seems to me we must be very careful and very precise, now that a majority of the Supreme Court has taken the position that non-national standards may govern, to require definition of just what local standards the law is referring to, lest tomorrow an Ingmar Bergman, a Stanley Kubrick or a Francois Truffaut be considered, by judicial fiat, to have produced something which according to a group of appellate judges even the residents of the “zoological gardens” 2 would find obscene.
I would reverse and remand for a new trial with instructions to the jury to be framed under whatever law the Higher Court has at the time of retrial last established.

. Some of us may think of that nature as dangerous, even to adults, some as debasing or corruptive, some as ludicrous. In the light of what Professor Emerson has called “a serious lack of evidence as to what the effects of obscenity, if any, actually are,” The System of Freedom of Expression 467, 498 (1969), to some of us it may appear pathetic that the mores of Queen Victoria prevailed for so long that people today actually pay good money to examine the schlock the appellants were convicted of transporting or *915conspiring to transport. As in prohibition, however, an artificial market for such trash has been created. One would hope that another generation—less imbued with the fantasies symbiotically related to the suppression of the past—will be less ready to buy this shoddy stuff. One must be careful, too, when one makes judgments in this area to remember that “the hard-core pornography test, like the Both test, [is] a way of allowing high-elass, elegantly packaged pornography, while denying pornography to the less affluent, educated or supposedly intelligent.” See Emerson, supra at 492.

. One cannot help but note, in passing, that in a true state of nature—zoological or otherwise—obscenity would not exist; it is, as the philosopher Berkeley would have said, only because it is perceived in the eye of the viewer.