Court Opinion

ID: 9465261
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 00:40:52.111047+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:39:04.084054
License: Public Domain

GEE, Circuit Judge,
with whom BROWN, Chief Judge, COLEMAN, AINSWORTH, TJOFLAT and VANCE, Circuit Judges, join, dissenting:
I.

Of Draconian Remedies and Strained Constructions to Avoid Them

Part I of the majority opinion reaches the same result on about the same reasoning as the panel opinion, see 559 F.2d at 1290-92. I concur in it.
II.

Of Injunctions, Statutes and Prior Restraints

Part II of the majority opinion declares Texas Article 4667(a)(3) unconstitutional as authorizing injunctions against the future exhibition of unnamed obscene films. The Texas statutes defining obscenity are couched in the language of the Supreme Court’s decision in Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15, 93 S.Ct. 2607, 37 L.Ed.2d 419 (1973), and there is no contention that their standards or definitions are overbroad. Further, the Texas courts (as a matter of general procedural law) require in the obscenity context as elsewhere that injunctions be specific, clear and definite. In the example chosen by the majority, Richards v. State, 497 S.W.2d 770 (Tex.Civ.App. — Beaumont 1973, no writ hist.), the injunction prohibited “exhibiting or selling any other films which show actual acts of fellatio . . ., cunnilingus . . ., actual oral genital contact between two or more males or females, any sexual intercourse, between any human and any animal or any scenes depicting actual sexual intercourse, between human males and females.” 497 S.W.2d at 772. Modifying the decree to incorporate the holding of Miller v. California, supra,1 the Texas court upheld the injunction.
Thus the holding of the majority appears to be that any injunction, no matter how specific, that restrains the exhibition of films by definitions or categories rather than one-by-one and after the fact of a specific, prior adjudication of obscenity is invalid. To quote from the opinion (Maj. op. p. 169):
“An injunction that forbids the showing of any film portraying the particular acts enumerated in the obscenity statute suppresses future films because past films have been deemed offensive. As Chief Justice Hughes wrote in Near v. Minnesota, supra, 283 U.S. 697, at 713, 51 S.Ct. 625, ‘[t]his is of the essence of censorship.’ ”
I think that there are serious flaws in this reasoning.
In the first place, the majority’s statement is simply incorrect: an injunction against exhibiting a film depicting enumerated acts from the obscenity statute suppresses that film not at all “because past films have been deemed offensive” but be*174cause the present film depicts the acts in a manner forbidden by the statute.
In the second, the quotation from Near v. Minnesota is a characterization of an entirely different sort of act — the suppression of publication of future issues of a newspaper because earlier issues were deemed scandalous. The analog of such a,n act in the present context would be the closing of King Art’s Theatre to exhibition of any film because it had exhibited obscene ones in the past. This would indeed be “of the essence of censorship,” but it is a far cry from an injunction forbidding in specific terms the exhibition of such films only as violate the statute.
Indeed, the majority’s reasoning on this head comes to little more than announcing that injunctions are prior restraints and prior restraints are bad. The suggestion that an injunction merely against obscene matter — admittedly unprotected by the first amendment — might be valid is disposed of, as nearly as I can understand the opinion, by the observation that obscenity cannot be defined with sufficient precision to be the subject matter of a valid injunction. Unless this is what the sentence at Maj. op. p. 169 commencing “Incorporation of the statutory definition of obscenity . merely begs the question” means, then I do not know what it means. But this argument proves too much, for if the definition is too vague for an injunction, surely it must also be too vague to satisfy due process as giving fair notice of conduct subject to criminal penalties?
More, the argument is overbroad in another respect. It implies that no injunction in a first amendment context is valid, though we know this is not so. Indeed, as a practical matter, I can see little if any difference between an injunction against exhibiting obscene films (constitutionally defined) and a statute against doing so, and what difference there is favors the injunction. As Mr. Justice Frankfurter wrote for the Court in Kingsley Books v. Brown, 354 U.S. 436, 441-2, 77 S.Ct. 1325, 1 L.Ed.2d 1469 (1957):
“The phrase ‘prior restraint’ is not a self-wielding sword. Nor can it serve as a talismanic test. The duty of closer analysis and critical judgment in applying the thought behind the phrase has thus been authoritatively put by one who brings weighty learning to his support of constitutionally protected liberties: ‘What is needed,’ writes Professor Paul A. Freund, ‘is a pragmatic assessment of its operation in the particular circumstances. The generalization that prior restraint is particularly obnoxious in civil liberties cases must yield to more particu-laristic analysis.’ The Supreme Court and Civil Liberties, 4 Vand.L.Rev. 533, 539.
“Wherein does § 22-a differ in its effective operation from the type of statute upheld in Alberts? Section 311 of California’s Penal Code provides that ‘Every person who wilfully and lewdly . keeps for sale . . . any obscene . book ... is guilty of a misdemeanor . . . .’ Section 1141 of New York’s Penal Law is similar. One would be bold to assert that the in terro-rem effect of such statutes less restrains booksellers in the period before the law strikes than does § 22-a. Instead of requiring the bookseller to dread that the offer for sale of a book, may without prior warning, subject him to a criminal prosecution with the hazard of imprisonment, the civil procedure assures him that such consequences cannot follow unless he ignores a court order specifically directed to him for a prompt and carefully circumscribed determination of the issue of obscenity. Until then, he may keep the book for sale and sell it on his own judgment rather than steer ‘nervously among the treacherous shoals.’ ”
Thus if a statute forbidding publication of obscenity can be constitutionally valid, it is hard for me to see how an injunction doing the same thing is per se invalid. Yet as nearly as I can understand the majority opinion, this is what Part II of it says.
III.

Of Kid Gloves and Obscenity

Part III of the court’s opinion purports to invalidate Texas Article 4667(a)(3) on the *175additional ground that it “lacks the procedural safeguards required by Freedman v. Maryland, 380 U.S. 51, 85 S.Ct. 734, 13 L.Ed.2d 649 (1965)” (Maj. op. p. 169) and hence fails to “treat obscenity with the kid gloves that the first amendment requires, .” (Maj. op. p. 172). But since Article 4667(a)(3) does no more than in general terms authorize an injunction, thus implicitly referring to the basic Texas injunction procedures, it is in fact these latter which the opinion finds procedurally deficient when sought to be employed against obscenity. These procedures are patterned on the Federal ones, Texas Rules of Civil Procedure 680 and 681 which define them being copied from Federal Rule 65, with minor and insignificant textual changes. It is plain, therefore, that a necessary consequence of the majority opinion is to invalidate our Rule 65 procedures to the same extent as the Texas ones, an effect which practitioners in our courts should note. Thus we impliedly hold today that those who crafted and promulgated our own Federal system of injunctions overlooked providing a procedure valid for use in the obscenity context, a somewhat far-reaching and arresting conclusion.
The majority reaches this result by fixing on one word of the Supreme Court’s language in two cases arising in a somewhat different context from this, court review of administrative censorship. With deference, it seems to me that the contexts are sufficiently dissimilar that the language in question need not and should not be applied here, where no administrator and no censor — only courts — figure in the matter anywhere. The two cases are Freedman v. Maryland, 380 U.S. 51, 85 S.Ct. 734, 13 L.Ed.2d 649 (1965), and Southeastern Promotions, Ltd. v. Conrad, 420 U.S. 546, 95 S.Ct. 1239, 43 L.Ed.2d 448 (1975); the word seized upon is the term “final.”
In a nutshell, the majority holds that Texas (and hence Federal) injunction procedures are invalid as applied to obscenity because they do not require a “final” ruling on the merits of obscenity before preliminary injunctions may issue against the pornographer, only the ascertainment of that “probable right” thought a sufficient basis for the interlocutory writ in all other contexts. This holding is said to be required by an expression of the Supreme Court in Freedman, refined and restated in Southeastern, running as follows:
We held in Freedman, and we reaffirm here, that a system of prior restraint runs afoul of the First Amendment if it lacks certain safeguards: First, the burden of instituting judicial proceedings, and of proving that the material is unprotected, must rest on the censor. Second, any restraint prior to judicial review can be imposed only for a specified brief period and only for the purpose of preserving the status quo. Third, a prompt final judicial determination must be assured. 420 U.S., at 560, 95 S.Ct. at 1247 (emphasis added).
The context of Freedman and Southeastern, however, was very different from this. Here all action, from start to finish, was judicial; no administrator or censor figured in the matter at any stage;2 and the only conceivable “prior restraint” would have been a preliminary injunction pendente lite. In Freedman, by contrast, there was involved a procedure for the absolute administrative suppression of a film by refusal of a censor’s license; and in Southeastern, the use of a theatre was administratively refused, thus preventing entirely the production of a musical there. These were “final” administrative acts; final, that is, unless and until those complaining of them took their cases to court and bore the burden of overturning them. In such situations, the quoted formulation by the Supreme Court makes sense and has full application: limiting the censor to a brief, administrative restraint, followed by judicial review at the instance of the censor, with the burden of proof upon him, and a required prompt, *176final judicial determination ending the administrative ministry one way or the other.
Nor has the Court left us in doubt about why it requires prompt and final judicial action in such a context: it is because “[djuring the time prior to judicial determination, the [administrative] restraint altered the status quo”3 and after administrative intervention “a judicial determination must occur ‘promptly so that administrative delay does not in itself become a form of censorship.’ ”4 In other words, only a brief non -judicial interdiction of matter arguably protected by the first amendment will be tolerated; and if material has been taken off the market by a final administrative action pending a judicial decision, that decision must come quickly. Here, however, neither reason for such a rule obtains. There neither was nor could have been any administrative restraint to alter the status quo. Nor could such a restraint (since there neither was nor could have been one) have required hurried judicial action finally upholding or reversing it, lest administrative delay become itself an instrument of suppression.
That these holdings have application to proceedings such as this, which contemplate neither censor nor other administrator but only the normal judicial process, is far from clear to me. To apply, their rule must be rewritten to run as follows: where a preliminary judicial decision resulting from an adversary hearing has been made that matter is probably obscene and should be taken off the market pendente lite, a procedural scheme — to be valid as applied to pornography — must further require that the judge conduct a prompt hearing on the merits of obscenity and render a prompt final judgment on it as well.
I do not deny that there are arguments that can be made in support of such a rule. It seems to me, however, that they are of quite a different sort than those which underlie the rule of Freedman and Southeastern: that censors (all too often, history teaches, afflicted by tunnel vision) should not be permitted to remove first-amendment type matter from the marketplace indefinitely or cast the burdens of going forward or of proof on its purveyors; and that where such matter is censored, prompt and effective review by a judge must be provided so that the matter is, if protected, returned to the marketplace without any lengthy languishing under administrative ban. I hope that I am not insensitive to first amendment considerations and issues; but it seems to me that where mere successive stages of judicial consideration — usually before the same judge — are concerned rather than review by the judge of a censor’s fiat, the general procedures which suffice for all other purposes should be sufficient for dealing with pornography.

Conclusion

For the above reasons, I respectfully dissent from Parts II and III of the opinion herein.

. “The injunction granted by this paragraph of the order is limited to works which, taken as a whole, appeal to the prurient interest in sex, which portray sexual conduct in a patently offensive way, and which, taken as a whole, do not have any serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” 497 S.W.2d at 782.

. Indeed, the only action ever contemplated was a suit by the county attorney to obtain an injunction against the showing of obscene motion pictures. King Arts forestalled even this by bringing its own suit in federal court to restrain the county attorney from such an action.

. Southeastern Promotions, Ltd. v. Conrad, 420 U.S. 546, 562 95 S.Ct. 1239, 1248, 43 L.Ed.2d 448 (1975).

. Heller v. New York, 413 U.S. 483, 489, 93 S.Ct. 2789, 2793, 37 L.Ed.2d 745 (1973), quoting from United States v. Thirty-Seven Photographs, 402 U.S. 363, 367, 91 S.Ct. 1400, 28 L.Ed.2d 44 (1971).