Court Opinion

ID: 9493132
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:58:58.913064+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:55:40.121263
License: Public Domain

KATZMANN, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent from the majority’s well-argued opinion. I would not apply the rule of lenity in this case. In Muscarello v. U.S., 524 U.S. 125, 118 S.Ct. 1911, 1919, 141 L.Ed.2d 111 (1998), the Supreme Court stated that the “simple existence of some statutory ambiguity ... is not sufficient to warrant application of that rule, for most statutes are ambiguous to some degree.” The Court continued: “To invoke the rule, we must conclude that there is a grievous ambiguity or uncertainty in the statute.” Id. at 1919 (internal quotation marks omitted). I do not think that there is such a “grievous ambiguity or uncertainty” in the statute before us, or that we can make “no more than a guess as to what Congress intended.” United States v. Wells, 519 U.S. 482, 499, 117 S.Ct. 921, 137 L.Ed.2d 107 (1997). The statute requires that the visual depiction be contained within books, magazines, periodicals, films, video tapes, or other matter. The word “contain” in the statute, consistent with its purposes, could mean both “comprise” and “hold” and still, in my view, not lead to “grievous ambiguity or uncertainty.” Nothing in the statute itself or in the legislative record suggests that Congress did not intend to use both ordinary meanings of the word “contain.” It makes sense, given the statute’s purposes, that a photograph could be understood— quite naturally — to “contain” a visual depiction.
I fully agree with the majority that the statute could result in some incongruous interpretations. But in the end, I conclude that we must “apply the provision as written, not as we would write it.” United States v. Demerritt, 196 F.3d 138, 143 (2d Cir.1999).