Court Opinion

ID: 9757897
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 23:03:25.982505+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:28:45.403429
License: Public Domain

Dissenting Opinion by
Mu. Justice Musmanno:
The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania had an opportunity in this case to unlimber some heavy artillery in fighting for American morality; it had unlimited freedom to pour devastating fire into the forces that would destroy the very foundations of decency, purity and wholesome conduct upon which our American society is founded; it had the clearest chance to draw from the armory of the law the weapons which would beat back those who, for greed and lucre, would poison the minds of the youth of our Commonwealth. The Supreme Court, however, did none of these things. The Majority of this Court retired from the field of battle without firing a shot. It did more. It encouraged the foul foe to smash more effectively at the bastions of American decency; it unfurled a flag of impeccability and authority over the invading filthy battalions; it supplied to each hoodlum in the putrid expeditionary *224force a bar of Ivory Soap which made him, according to the Majority’s reasoning, 99 1/2% pure!
I disassociate myself, as far as I can, intellectually, jurisprudentially, and philosophically, from the decision of this Court in this case.
Here was a case where this Court could have declared that the book under consideration was so devoid of literary merit, so odious in its presentation of its immoral theme, so obviously designed to appeal to the baser animalism of man, that its sale and distribution should be outlawed in Pennsylvania. Whom would such a decision have hurt or offended? No one but those who are heaping up sordid dollars, as a rake gathers up rotten leaves in an abandoned and unseeded garden.
The Majority Opinion says that “our decision in this case . . . should not, in any manner, be construed as an approval of ‘Candy.’ ” How else can it be construed? The Majority’s statement is like saying that the Court does not approve of a snake entering a nursery but forbids anyone to build a fence around the nursery to keep the serpent out. I reject as untenable the pious statement that the Majority does not approve of “Candy” when the opinion oleaginously oozes with praise of this filthy book. It points out that “Candy”* sold over 2 1/2 million copies in the hard cover edition. How does that establish that it is not obscene? There are millions of persons who use narcotics which admittedly are ruinous to health. Does that say that narcotics should be sold freely?1
The Majority Opinion calls the central character in “Candy” the “heroine.” This “heroine” is a prostitute, a degenerate, a deviate, and a defiler of the truth. *225The Majority Opinion appends glowing testimonials of tlie book from certain periodicals. It quotes from one review: “Nowhere has sex been sicker than in the U.' S., and sick for so long we have forgotten it is supposed to be healthy.”
How healthy a book is “Candy”? What salubriousness does it contribute to the moral health of the nation? The book revoltingly describes in detail a sexual act between a father and his daughter, it portrays the debauching of a niece by her uncle, it relates a disgusting perversion between a girl and a depraved, deformed man, it speaks of unnatural practices which would make the beasts of Sodom and Gomorrah ashamed. And this is what the periodical the Majority cites with approval calls healthy sex!
One book quoted by the Majority declares the book is not pornographic but concedes it is “dirty as hell.”
The Majority Opinion states: “It is generally conceded, by the book’s friends and foes, that it is a satire or at least an attempt at satire upon the cultural ideals of our contemporary society.”
This statement is wholly unsupported by the facts. I can be listed as one of the book’s foes and I certainly do not regard it as a “satire upon the cultural ideals of our contemporary society.” There is nothing in the ideal culture of our contemporary society which remotely resembles the reprehensible conduct, the bestial practices described in “Candy.”
Then the Majority quotes from one of the defenders of the book who said that “Candy” is a “spoof on sex.” “Candy” is as much a spoof on sex as a garbage dump is a spoof on a garbage dump. “Candy” is the garbage dump. It is rotten-core pornography. It is not a satire on pornography, it is not a spoof on sex, it is plainly an outrageous display of depravity in its most loathsome forms. Those who attempt to defend the book as a work of satire, culture, or literary art would never ad*226mit that they would look with favor upon their children reading it.
The Majority is not content to quote from reviews of “Candy.” It gratuitously shovels into its opinion, and thus further burdens, as well as contaminates, the pages of the Pennsylvania State Reports, libidinous comments on another book, as they appeared in a Federal court case.2 The Majority points out that there are other books more obscene than “Candy.” In this, the Majority apparently proceeds on the theory that since “Candy” is surpassed in degeneracy by other vile works, “Candy” should not be subject to injunction under Pennsylvania laws. This is like saying that a person in the early stages of a contagious venereal disease may not be excluded from waiting on the dining table because there are syphilitics working in the kitchen.
Thus, the Majority tells of other purveyors of sewage, such as “Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure,” “Naked Lunch,” “Tropic of Cancer” and similar pornographic junk, and argues that since they were not banned, “Candy” has at least a minimum or modicum of “social value.” But the Majority does not give the slightest hint of what that “social value” is. It apparently advances the theme that a community of people should not object to being pushed into a mud pond because there are other communities which permit cesspools where frogs and lizards revel in natatorial slime.
The Majority admits that “Candy” is an obscene book, but then in an astonishing non sequitur declares that it cannot be banned because it does not go. “far beyond customary limits of candor.” What does the Majority regard as the limits of candor? Is it customary candor for decent people to discuss in intimate *227detail the dung-covered incestuous conduct described in the book? Do people in decent society employ the gutter language spoken by the execrable radish-white humped back cretin in the book? The answer is obvious, yet the Majority finds that this maggoty language is customary candor. In what neighborhood does the Majority hear this “customary candor” billingsgate?
The Majority Opinion is a long one; it is erudite, complicated, and as studded with citations and footnotes as a broken plank with bent nails, but it never comes to grips with the problem the litigation presents. The Act of June 1, 1956, P. L. (1955) 1997, as amended, 18 P.S. §3832.1, under which the District Attorney proceeded in this case, proclaims against the sale or distribution of a book which “constitutes a danger to the welfare” of the community. Nowhere in the 28-page Majority Opinion is there the slightest discussion of the baleful effects on communities of an obscene book. One of the specific findings of fact of the court below reads: “Circulation and distribution of the book ‘Candy’ constitutes a danger to the welfare of the community.”
The Majority Opinion makes no mention of this formidable finding which has the standing of a jury’s verdict. It disposes of the case by saying that the decision of the court below was “subjective.” What else could it be? A judge trying a murder case does not go out and commit a murder in order to learn what murder is. He reaches a conclusion after hearing the evidence, and that is what the lower court did, and that is what the Majority of this Court did not do. If there is an opinion that is subjective, it is the Majority Opinion. It is not only subjective, it is academic, theoretical and discursive, with considerable hypothesis and it contains even a dash of prediction as to what *228the Supreme Court of the United States will do, a daring proposition indeed.
Prohibition against obscenity is not only a matter of cleanliness and godliness; the health of the community is involved. It has been established in thousands of cases that there can be a direct connection between abnormal sex books and sex crimes. Those who profess not to see this connection are either abysmally ignorant or refuse to accept the truth. I quote from some authorities on the subject: Dr. Nicholas G-. Frignito, Psychiatrist of the County Court of Philadelphia: “The most singular factor inducing the adolescent to sexual activities is pornography; the lewd picture, the smutty book, the obscenely pictured playing card, the girlie magazines . . . pornography fosters impure habits and desires . .'. it can cause sexually aggressive acts and in some instances lead to the slaying of the victim”. J. Edgar Hoover: “Sex-mad magazines are creating criminals faster than jails can be built to house them”. The late Dr. Benjamin Karpman, Chief Psychotherapist, St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Washington, D.C.: “. . . there is a direct relationship between juvenile delinquency, sex life and pornographic literature”. The National Council of Juvenile Court Judges, in a resolution: “The character of juvenile delinquency has changed as a consequence of the stimulation of salacious publications, being no longer the mischievous acts of children, but acts of violence, armed robbery, rape, torture and even homicide, for which the vicious publications condition the minds of our children”. Inspector Herbert Case, Detroit Police Department : “I have yet to see a sex murder case in the history of the Detroit Police Department but what I can show you obscene literature . . .” Detective Lt. Austin B. Duke, St. Louis County Police: “I have never picked up a juvenile sex offender who didn’t have this stuff with him, in his car or in his house”. *229O. W. Wilson, Chicago Police Superintendent: “Obscene literature is a primary problem in the United States today. Sexual arousals from obscene literature have been responsible for criminal behavior from vicious assaults to homicide”. Dr. Max Levin, Psychiatrist, New York: “I am convinced pornography is undermining the mental health of countless youngsters . .. whose personalities are being warped by harmful influences in their early years . . . Unscrupulous publishers cater to their sex hungers, and their lurid books are hot numbers on newstands, in candy stores and wherever teenagers gather”.
Why have there been laws against obscenity reaching back into the days of antiquity? It is because obscenity, lewdness, lasciviousness strike at the very moral fiber of a people and, when that disintegrates, a nation perishes. Justice Harlan said in the Roth-Alberts case (354 U.S. 502), that “The State can reasonably draw the inference that over a long period of time the indiscriminate dissemination of materials, the essential character of which is to degrade sex, will have an eroding effect on moral standards.” We know that Home was great and went into decline; that Greece was the flower of culture, and that weeds finally grew in the Acropolis; that the Persian, Egyptian, Babylonian and numerous other civilizations were powerful, rich and indomitable but something happened to them and they moldered into decay — not because of armed invasion from without their gates, but from moral deterioration within their walls.
In 1874 Justice Swayne, speaking for an unanimous United States Supreme Court, declared: “The foundation of a republic is the virtue of its citizens. They are at once sovereigns and subjects. As the foundation is undermined, the structure is weakened. When it is destroyed, the fabric must fall. Such is the voice of history.”: Trist v. Child, 21 Wall. 441, 450.
*230The contemporary United States Supreme Court has drifted far from the wisdom and fundamental democratic philosophy inherent in the above quotation. The Majority Opinion in the case at bar seeks to justify its conclusions citing from recent decisions of the Court on Capitol ITill in Washington. Those decisions are a lighthouse with broken beams. The majority opinions of the present U. S. Supreme Court, on the subject of obscenity, constitute a never-never land of confusion and self-contradiction. Taken in the aggregate, those opinions suggest a region hazy with drifting fogs, beset with contrary wind currents, criss-crossed with labyrinthian, tortuous foot trails, perforated with pitfalls and tortured with quicksands, which no legal traveler could hope to traverse and emerge therefrom with a precise knowledge as to where he had been, what he had seen, and where he was now going. It is with regret that I say this, but it is with conviction, based on intensive study of late Supreme Court decisions, that I say the Court itself does not seem to know where it is going on this subject which affects the homes, the welfare, and the moral standards of the nation.
I state, again with reluctance, that the Supreme Court of the United States has failed to measure up to its responsibilities in this area of the law. I have respect for the highest Court in the land, I am bound by its decisions, but I wish it would make up its mind as to what is its decision in this realm of jurisprudence. I will illustrate my point by quoting from the Majority Opinion in this case, namely: “Because of the wide difference of opinion on the Supreme Court, perhaps the only way to obtain a sense for the Court’s attitude qua Court is to consider the views of each individual Justice. A breakdown of the individual votes in the eleven Redrup related cases reveals the following: Justices Black, Douglas and Stewart predictably voted to reverse in each instance, but so did Justices *231White and Fortas, Justice Brennan voted to reverse the conviction in seven cases, to affirm two cases (both involving movies) without giving any reason, and to affirm one case on the authority of Ginzburg and to vacate and remand one case on the authority of Memoirs. Chief Justice Warren voted to reverse in two cases, to affirm in two cases (both involving movies) without giving any reason, to affirm two cases on the authority of Mishkin and one on the authority of Ginzburg, to vacate and remand one case in light of Memoirs, and to set down three cases for oral argument. Justice Clark voted to reverse in two cases, to affirm in five cases without giving his reasons, to affirm two cases on the authority of Mishkin and one on the authority of Ginzburg and to set down one case for oral argument . . .” (Emphasis supplied)
The reason so many Justices gave no reason for their decisions is that there is no reason to the decisions. The decisions are a conglomeration of personal views, individual tangents and private predilections, without much thought apparently being given to the effect those decisions will have on the nation as a whole. I state, again with disinclination, that the Supreme Court of the United States has failed to live up to its solemn responsibility of protecting, through a serious interpretation and firm enforcement, of the laws of the land, the ramparts of moral standards, the crumbling of which will bring disaster to our country. The Supreme Court has simply refused to meet its obligations in considering a grave situation which affects American youth, into whose hands the destiny of our nation will one day be committed.
When this case was being considered by the court below, decision was delayed awaiting clarification of the whole problem of obscenity by the highest court of the land. On March 21, 1966, the Supreme Court spoke though 14 opinions handed down in three cases. The *232lower court called the Supreme Court decisions “a congeries of pronouncements,” in which it looked “in vain for the anticipated illumination.” Also, “we feel that the mountain has labored and brought forth a litter of mice.”
Dismay was spoken by many periodicals in the land. The New York Herald Tribune declared in a headline: “Supreme Court Compounds the Obscenity Confusion;” the Philadelphia Inquirer headlined: “Muddy Issue of Legal Obscenity”; the Washington Post described the Court’s decisions as “murky”; The New Leader: “The already rickety concept of obscenity has been reduced to constitutional rubbles”; Newsweek: “Dizzying . . . leaving an already tangled body of law more puzzling than ever;” London Economist: “An astonishing decision;” Chicago Daily News: “Once more, the Court has failed to find a definition of obscenity;” Library Journal: “Incredibly jumbled decision;” Toledo Blade: “A Morass.” Chicago Tribune: “A lot of tortuous logic.”
Now, if the Court’s failure to discharge its judicial duties in this field resulted only in verbal confusion, one could overlook shallow study, nebulous syntax, vocabular circumlocution and indifference to stare decisis, but the tragedy is that, with confusion at the sentinel gate, the pornographic thieves steal into the citadel of our moral security. Because of unconcerned laxity at the ramparts, the explosives fashioned by the arch pornographer of America, Henry Miller, are being maneuvered under the very foundation of the Ten Commandments. . There is not one principle in the Decalogue that Henry Miller has not in his books defiled, denounced, despoiled and defamed. And yet the Supreme Court found no violation of the law in his unspeakably degenerate “Tropic of Cancer.”
Judge Stephens described the “Tropic of Cancer” and its companion “Tropic of Capricorn”, as follows: *233“The vehicle of description is the unprintable word of the debased and morally bankrupt. Practically everything that the world loosely regards as sin is detailed in the vivid, lurid, salacious language of smut, prostitution, and dirt. And all of it is related without the slightest expressed idea of its abandon. . . The author conducts the reader through sex orgies and perversions of the sex organs, and always in the debased language of the bawdy house. Nothing has the grace of purity or goodness. These words of the language of smut and the disgraceful scenes, are so heavily larded throughout the books that those portions which are deemed to be of literary merit do not lift the reader’s mind clear of their sticky slime.” (Besig v. U.S., 208 F. 2d 142.)
The publishers of “Tropic of Cancer” referred to its author Henry Miller as a “respected writer.” Judge Carroll of the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas replied: “I can’t believe a man is a respected writer who would say he would give a kick in the pants to God, who would call the Jews kikes, and the colored people niggers. . . He insults the very image of Christianity, he insults the Jewish race — and this is apart from the obscenity.” (Com. v. Robin, 421 Pa. 70.)
But the Supreme Court of the United States found “Tropic of Cancer” worthy of lodgment and circulation in the public libraries of the land, allowing that foul and festering monstrosity to circulate with the Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress, Homer’s Iliad and Shakespeare’s Works.
The Supreme Court of the United States has written scores of decisions on obscenity. It has laid down rules, expounded principles, established standards and then later ignored or dismissed them all. It draws fine line distinctions in the areas of community standards, prurient appeal, contemporary society, social value, etc., and then proceeds, in effect, to offer in one form or another, a free passport to every book which *234comes before it, no matter how degraded or vile it may be. It is a significant fact, as admitted by the Majority Opinion in this case, and I quote from the opinion: “The Court (Supreme Court of the United States) has yet to find a published work obscene per se.”! !
I do not believe that the framers of our nation’s Constitution ever intended that the judges of the Supreme Court were to perform as super-censors on books. The question of the propriety of the distribution of questioned literature should be left to the States where it was prior to 1787 and which no one at that time ever thought of transferring to the nation. In 1887 the Supreme Court acknowledged that it was the province of the legislative department of government to exercise the necessary police powers to stand guard over public morality: “The power to determine such questions (what is offensive to public morality) so as to bind all, must exist somewhere; else society will be at the mercy of the few, who, regarding only their own appetites or passions, may be willing to imperil the peace and security of the many, provided only they are permitted to do as they please. Under our system that power is lodged with the legislative branch of the government. It belongs to that department to exert what are known as police powers of the state, and to determine primarily what measures are appropriate or needful for the protection of the public morals, the public health, or the public safety.” (Mugler v. Kansas, 123 U.S. 623.)
Nevertheless, the Supreme Court has deliberately assumed jurisdiction over the millions of books, pamphlets, magazines and newspapers in the land, a jurisdiction it cannot possibly cope with. And then to make matters worse, it attempts to apply a yardstick which can have no application to realities. The standard for determining obscenity, as laid down in the Roth case, is “whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of *235the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient interest.”
What is a community? It is a region, a circumscribed area as a town, village, neighborhood. In its broadest concept it could possibly envelop a State, but it is contrary to common usage to apply the word “community” to a nation, and this is what the Supreme Court has done. (Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184.)
But, even after arbitrarily giving to community a national significance, the Supreme Court has ignored the moral standards of the American people as a whole. It has fashioned most of its decisions on obscenity on the views and attitudes of an infinitesimal minority, literary critics and book reviewers, who, with their admitted talents, cannot possibly speak for the masses not so sophisticated as those who make the reviewing of books their profession.
This summary seizure of jurisdiction by the Supreme Court in this field has worked, and continues to work, havoc in the individual states which are frequently compelled to wait for decisions from Washington as to whether a certain book may or may not be sold at a newstand in a village in North Dakota. And more often than not, the expected decision turns out to be so cloudy in exposition and disposition that the pornographic culprit escapes under cover of the rhetorical smoke.
The decisions of the United States Supreme Court in obscenity cases have raised alarm in the most venerable places of the nation — the home, the church, and the school.
The Philadelphia Inquirer published in September of this year four articles written by Joseph C. Goulden of the Inquirer Staff, entitled “Merchants of Smut.” No one can read this extremely well written series of the appalling extent of pornographic literature being sold and consumed in Philadelphia and the vastness of *236mail order pornography polluting the mails of the nation, without being concerned over what is to happen to. the minds of the youth in America. I quote briefly from this series which should be required reading for prosecuting officers and judges: “The legalization of pornography has touched off a commercialized smut boom in Philadelphia that it is bringing the dirty books from their traditional under-the-counter hiding places. . . . Commercialized pornography thrives because the low-grade smut dealers operate under the same umbrella of constitutional rights that the Supreme Court originally unfolded for works of a serious literary nature.”
■■ ■ The Pennsylvania Supreme Court missed a coveted opportunity in the case at bar to strike a blow for decency, since the U. S. Supreme Court has not yet passed on the book which is the subject of the current legislation. Of course, one could well imagine that, after the U. S. Supreme Court allowed the British pandering whore Fanny Hill to pass into the temple of purity, it would not bar entrance to the frowzy, streetwalking, subterranean harlot “Candy.” Still, this Court could have made the effort to save a few Pennsylvania children from the stench of “Candy” because a-little time might elapse between our banning it and the Supreme Court’s striking down the ban.
And then there could always be the possibility, as remote as it seems today, that the U. S. Supreme Court might respect its historical pronouncements that freedom of the press does not include the publication of obscenity. In Chaplinski v. New Hampshire, 315 U.S. 568 (1942), the high Court said: “. . . There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem. . These include the lewd and obscene. . . It has been well observed that such utterances are no essen*237tial part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.”
Ten years later, the U. S. Supreme Court declared in Beauharnais v. Illinois, 343 U.S. 250: “Certainly no one would contend that obscene speech, for example, may be punished only upon a showing of such circumstances (clear and present danger). . .”
Then in 1957 the Court said, in Roth v. U.S., 354 U.S. 476 that “implicit in the history of the First Amendment is the rejection of obscenity as utterly without redeeming social importance.” But what about 1967? Does the present Supreme Court, with its emphasis on ad hoc reasoning, consider 1957 too ancient to control 1967?
The Majority Opinion in this case, went to a great deal of care to discuss, dissect and describe the above quoted sentence from the Roth case, and said it was “logically circular.” Then it said: “On the one hand, one can conclude, as do Justices Clark and White, that obscenity by definition has no redeeming social importance. On the other hand, Justice Brennan believes that a work which has even a minimum of social importance is by definition not obscene, a view shared by Chief Justice Warren and Justice Fortas. Since Justices Black, Douglas and Stewart believe that the Brennan approach is too restrictive, we must accept the Brennan analysis as ‘settled law’ with respect to obscenity vel non, at least until five members of the Court agree on a new definition. This is because simple arithmetic shows that the votes of the ‘Brennan block’ along with that of the ‘Black-Douglas-Stewart Axis’ will, of necessity, result in a finding that the work, in the absence of pandering, is entitled to constitutional protection.”
*238From all this we conclude that the Majority of this Court, by taking into the chamber of consideration and consultation an arithmetic table, a block, an ax, and circular logic, arrived at the conclusion that there could be no use in waiting to see what the Supreme Court might say in “Candy,” and thus, with a circular saw, it sawed away the rights of the people of Pennsylvania to be saved from the inundation of filth gushing from the pages of a book which the Majority finds possesses a minimum of social importance but never explains why.
Because, of course, it cannot!
From Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, from' Dan to Beersheba, and from the ramparts of the Bible to Samuel Eliot Morison’s Oxford History of the American People, I dissent!

 Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” reached a sale of over ten million. Would the Majority say that that book did not have an evil influence and did not contribute to the horrible atrocities perpetrated on the Jewish people?

 That book not only deals with pornography but it defames police officers as profligates and sensualists.