Court Opinion

ID: 9487206
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 12:10:58.565602+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:52:09.056423
License: Public Domain

JOHN W. REYNOLDS, District Judge,
dissenting.
This law is overbroad, chilling, and a questionable deterrent to child pornography, and thus runs contrary to the First Amendment. The majority opinion permits an unwarranted intrusion into the First Amendment rights of citizens who are not child pornographers. Therefore, I respectfully dissent.
The statute regulates a wide variety of material — some kinds more protected by the First Amendment than others. Some material covered by the statute is “obscene” under Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15, 93 S.Ct. 2607, 37 L.Ed.2d 419 (1973),1 or is child pornography, and not protected speech at all. See New York v. Ferber, 458 U.S. 747, 102 S.Ct. 3348, 73 L.Ed.2d 1113 (1982). Some of the material is “indecent,” but indecent, non-obscene speech is protected by the First Amendment, albeit the trend in Supreme Court eases appears to be to relax the standard of review for such speech. Compare Sable Communications of California, Inc. v. FCC, 492 U.S. 115, 109 S.Ct. 2829, 106 L.Ed.2d 93 (1989) (ban on indecent telephone *95message services violated the First Amendment because it exceeded what was necessary to serve the compelling interest of preventing exposure of minors to the messages) with Barnes v. Glen Theatre, Inc., 501 U.S. 560, 111 S.Ct. 2456, 115 L.Ed.2d 504 (1991) (Rehnquist, J., plurality opinion) (nude dancing is only marginally within the parameters of First Amendment protection). The law also regulates depictions which may have a significant educational, artistic, or political value, and which receive full First Amendment protection.
Although the statute reaches far beyond depictions which involve or are likely to involve children, it regulates each of these areas in the same burdensome manner. As such, the law is overbroad and chilling, and it is impossible to rewrite it through judicial means so that it survives First Amendment scrutiny.
I am not convinced that this statute is “content neutral.” On its face, it is directed at a particular type of expression. This law does not have a merely “incidental limitation” on expression protected by the First Amendment. However, even under the more relaxed standard applied to content-neutral regulation of expressive conduct propounded in United States v. O’Brien, 391 U.S. 367, 88 S.Ct. 1673, 20 L.Ed.2d 672 (1968),2 this statute must be stricken. There is enough “bite” left in the O’Brien standard to strike a statute when it has more than incidental effects on First Amemdment expression and does not effectively further an important governmental interest. The statute cannot even be used for its intended purpose of helping to prosecute child pornographers, because the Act itself precludes the use of the records, directly or indirectly, in a child pornography prosecution.
Thus, I would affirm the lower court’s opinion.

. In order to determine whether material is "obscene,” the Supreme Court has formulated a three-part test:
(a)whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest;
(b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable ... law; and
(c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
Id. at 24, 93 S.Ct. at 2615 (citations omitted).

. Under O’Brien, a content-neutral government regulation of expressive conduct is justified if that regulation: (1) is within the government’s constitutional power; (2) furthers a substantial governmental interest; (3) the governmental interest is unrelated to free speech; (4) incidental restrictions on First Amendment freedoms are "no greater than is essential to the furtherance of that interest.” Id.