Court Opinion

ID: 9469113
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:32:26.718612+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:41:13.760316
License: Public Domain

JAMES DICKSON PHILLIPS, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
I share the majority’s discomfiture that in this case the protection of precious first amendment values is being claimed by “purveyors of hard core pornography” rather than by the beleaguered political and social dissidents for whom its core protections were most surely designed. But I dissent from the decision that the frontiers of the protection do not reach so far as is here claimed. I think the front-line defenses of the first amendment must — for protection of those ultimate core values — be understood to lie this far from the core. More importantly, I believe that the Supreme Court has consistently so read the Framers’ understanding and intention.
The majority opinion carefully and skillfully examines the workings of the North Carolina obscenity nuisance statute in an attempt to show its reasonableness and its substantial identity, in terms of practical effect, with the normal in terrorem effect of any general proscription of obscenity-related conduct by criminal statute. The key feature of this civil nuisance statute remains, however, the power it gives the state’s courts to permanently enjoin, under peril of the contempt sanction, the sale or exhibition of materials that no judicial tribunal has yet determined to be obscene. The Supreme Court has never upheld such a statute. On the contrary, ever since Near v. Minnesota ex rel. Olson, 283 U.S. 697, 51 S.Ct. 625, 75 L.Ed. 1357 (1931), the Court has unfailingly distinguished between the chilling effect of prior restraints resulting from civil injunctions prohibiting the distribution of material not yet found to be outside first amendment protection and that resulting from the general in terrorem effect of criminal statutes prohibiting, under peril of criminal sanctions, distributions of the same material.
It is true that Near itself recognized that the protection against “previous restraints” is not “absolutely unlimited.” The Court reasoned:
No one would question but that a government might prevent actual obstruction to its recruiting service or the publication of the sailing dates of transports or the number and location of troops. On similar grounds, the primary requirements of decency may be enforced against obscene publications. The security of the community life may be protected against incitements to acts of violence and the overthrow by force of orderly government.
283 U.S. at 716, 51 S.Ct. at 631 (footnote omitted). These examples of permissible restraint do not suggest, however, that the Near Court would have permitted an injunction against the unprotected publications without a prior determination that they divulged troop locations, or were obscene, or incited violence. Indeed, the Court cited Near when it struck down, just two terms ago, a Texas statute strikingly similar to the one under review here. Vance v. Universal Amusement Co., 445 U.S. 308, 100 S.Ct. 1156, 63 L.Ed.2d 413 (1980) (per curiam).1 It reiterated that “the *1372burden of supporting an injunction against a future exhibition is even heavier than the burden of justifying the imposition of a criminal sanction for a past communication.” Id. at 315-16, 100 S.Ct. at 1160.
This heavy burden to which the Vance Court referred has so far been found satisfied only by injunctions against named materials judicially found to be obscene or by injunctions strictly limited temporally, see, e.g., Kingsley Books, Inc. v. Brown, 354 U.S. 436, 77 S.Ct. 1325, 1 L.Ed.2d 1469 (1957). Even then, such limited injunctions must comply with strict procedural safeguards, see Freedman v. Maryland, 380 U.S. 51, 85 S.Ct. 734, 13 L.Ed.2d 649 (1965), including the requirement that “[a]ny restraint imposed in advance of a final judicial determination on the merits must similarly be limited to preservation of the status quo for the shortest fixed period compatible with sound judicial resolution.” 380 U.S. at 59, 85 S.Ct. at 739. The statute here challenged has, in the final analysis, neither of these saving features.
Other courts of appeals have been similarly concerned to maintain the prior restraint line precisely at this point of distinction between the permanent civil injunction directed at material not specifically adjudicated obscene and the general prohibitions of obscenity by criminal statutes. The former involves an inherently vague command whose in terrorem effect is not ameliorated by the full procedural safeguards known by citizens to stand between them and imposition by the state of its criminal sanctions. See, e.g., Spokane Arcades, Inc. v. Brockett, 631 F.2d 135 (9th Cir. 1980) (relying on the Supreme Court decision in Vance to strike down a Washington state statute substantially similar to the North Carolina statute), summarily aff’d, - U.S. -, 102 S.Ct. 557, 70 L.Ed.2d 468 (1981); Universal Amusement Co. v. Vance, 587 F.2d 159 (5th Cir. 1978) (en banc), aff’d, 445 U.S. 308, 100 S.Ct. 1156, 63 L.Ed.2d 413 (1980). The precise shortcomings of the North Carolina statute in these critical respects have been ably articulated by the district court below, 445 F.Supp. 130 (1978), and by Justice Exum in his well reasoned dissents in the two Chateau X cases, State ex rel. Andrews v. Chateau X, Inc., 296 N.C. 251, 268, 250 S.E.2d 603, 613 (1979); and Chateau X, Inc. v. State ex rel. Andrews, 302 N.C. 321, 330, 275 S.E.2d 443, 449 (1981).
The majority attempts finally to distinguish Near, the patriarch case, as involving verbal political speech as opposed to pictorial non-political speech. Though all must concede that political speech is at the heart of the first amendment protections, see generally A. Meiklejohn, Free Speech and Its Relation to Self Government (1948), the Supreme Court has consistently applied the Near doctrine to the obscenity area in general and, in particular, has relied upon Near as support for striking down the prior restraint of motion pictures. See, e.g., Vance; Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson, 343 U.S. 495, 501, 72 S.Ct. 777, 780, 96 L.Ed. 1098 (1952) (“It cannot be doubted that motion pictures are a significant medium for the communication of ideas .... The importance of motion pictures as an organ of public opinion is not lessened by the fact that they are designed to entertain as well as to inform.”). Since the Supreme Court has declined to limit the Near doctrine to verbal political speech, I think we may not appropriately rely upon this distinction to save the statute in question.
In summary, until the Supreme Court affirmatively pulls back the perimeter defense line against prior restraints which, since Near, has not been held to permit intrusions past those made by criminal statutes and civil injunctions of quite short duration, I think we should continue to enforce that clearly recognizable line as the authoritatively established one. I doubt that the ultimate values at stake can be *1373protected over the long haul by defenses drawn in more closely or made more flexible, and I read the controlling Supreme Court decisions as reflecting exactly that judgment about the intended reach of first amendment protections in this troublesome realm.
I would affirm the judgment of the district court.

. Dissenting, Justice White, joined by Justice Rehnquist, would have upheld the Texas statute on the specific basis that it is “functionally *1372indistinguishable from a criminal obscenity statute,” 445 U.S. at 324, 100 S.Ct. at 1165, that criminal prohibitions of obscenity are clearly compatible with the first amendment, and thus, the obscenity injunction statute is likewise constitutional. This position was, however, expressly rejected by a five-member majority opinion. See 445 U.S. at 316 & n. 13, 100 S.Ct. at 1161 & n. 13.