Court Opinion

ID: 9628909
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 09:33:59.571077+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:14:22.617259
License: Public Domain

KAREN NELSON MOORE, Circuit Judge,
dissenting, joined by Judges MARTIN and COLE.
I join in Judge Kennedy’s dissenting opinion and agree that 18 U.S.C. § 2257 is facially overbroad because it burdens, through the threat of criminal sanctions, a substantial amount of protected speech, a primary example being images made and kept by adult couples in the privacy of their own homes. The majority all but admits, as it must, that § 2257 covers the production of these protected images, and I agree with Judge Kennedy that the government’s purported lack of enforcement in this area does not alter the analysis. I write separately only to elaborate on the additional conclusion of Judge Kennedy’s dissent that § 2257’s universal age-verification and record-keeping requirements, which apply equally to old and young alike, are unconstitutional as applied to Connection and to John and Jane Doe.
Although § 22571 applies only to sexually explicit images, the majority contends that the law is content-neutral and should be evaluated pursuant to the intermediate-scrutiny standard. The majority asserts that a regulation of speech is content-neutral so long as the government was aiming at the “secondary effects” of the speech, Majority Op. at 328, and cites several cases dealing with “time, place, and manner regulations” that affect speech, see, e.g., City of Los Angeles v. Alameda Books, Inc., 535 U.S. 425, 122 S.Ct. 1728, 152 L.Ed.2d 670 (2002); Ward v. Rock Against Racism, 491 U.S. 781, 109 S.Ct. 2746, 105 L.Ed.2d 661 (1989); City of Renton v. Playtime Theatres, Inc., 475 U.S. 41, 106 S.Ct. 925, 89 L.Ed.2d 29 (1986). The zoning ordinances at issue in these cases, as well as the “secondary effects” at which they were aimed, are much different than the statutory scheme before us. In *362the controlling opinion in Alameda Books, Justice Kennedy emphasized the unique quality of such zoning restrictions, explaining that “[t]he zoning context provides a built-in legitimate rationale, which rebuts the usual presumption that content-based restrictions are unconstitutional.” 535 U.S. at 449, 122 S.Ct. 1728 (Kennedy, J., concurring in judgment). Alameda Books concerned a zoning ordinance prohibiting the establishment of more than one adult-entertainment business in the same building. The city enacted this regulation in response to evidence that concentrations of adult businesses were associated with higher rates of robbery, thefts, prostitution, and assaults in the surrounding neighborhood. The secondary effects at which the government aimed were thus quite distinct from the regulated speech itself. Here, the line between the direct effects and the secondary effects of the speech is much blurrier than in these zoning cases. Unlike these time, place, and manner restrictions, the evil at which § 2257 is aimed, child pornography, is a type of speech, albeit unprotected, that is a subset of the regulated speech, sexually explicit images. It is therefore impossible to separate the content-based aspect of the regulation from the justification, as the justification itself relates to an aspect of the speech: its sexually explicit nature. As explained in my concurrence in the panel opinion, § 2257 is precisely the type of content-based restriction of speech to which we must apply strict scrutiny. See Connection Distrib. Co. v. Keisler, 505 F.3d 545, 568 & n. 1 (6th Cir.2007) (Moore, J., concurring).
Because I conclude, however, that § 2257 is unconstitutional as applied to Connection and the Does regardless of whether intermediate scrutiny or strict scrutiny applies, I will assume for purposes of this dissent that intermediate scrutiny is applicable. Under intermediate scrutiny, challenged regulations of speech can be upheld only if the government shows “that they are narrowly tailored to serve a significant governmental interest, and that they leave open ample alternative channels for communication.” Ward, 491 U.S. at 791, 109 S.Ct. 2746. I agree that the government has a significant, indeed compelling, interest in preventing the sexual exploitation of minors in child pornography. I cannot agree, however, that § 2257 is narrowly tailored to this interest. In the context of intermediate scrutiny, “the requirement of narrow tailoring is satisfied ‘so long as the ... regulation promotes a substantial government interest that would be achieved less effectively absent the regulation.’ ” Ward, 491 U.S. at 799, 109 S.Ct. 2746 (quoting United States v. Albertini, 472 U.S. 675, 689, 105 S.Ct. 2897, 86 L.Ed.2d 536 (1985) (alteration in original)). Although, unlike under strict scrutiny, the regulation need not be the least restrictive means of promoting the substantial government interest, id. at 798-800, 109 S.Ct. 2746, it may not “burden substantially more speech than is necessary to further the government’s legitimate interests,” id. at 799, 109 S.Ct. 2746. In other words, if the government “regulate^] expression in such a manner that a substantial portion of the burden on speech does not serve to advance its goals,” the regulation is not narrowly tailored. Id.
Given the alarming breadth of the universal age-verification requirement at issue, I must conclude that § 2257 burdens substantially more speech than is necessary to further the government’s interest in preventing the sexual exploitation of minors. According to the government, Congress’s purpose in enacting § 2257 was to prevent the sexual exploitation of minors in child pornography. Elsewhere, Congress has chosen to advance these *363ends directly by passing a flat ban on the production of child pornography. See 18 U.S.C. § 2251. It also has chosen to advance these means indirectly by prohibiting the distribution, receipt, and possession of child pornography. See 18 U.S.C. § 2252; see also New York v. Ferber, 458 U.S. 747, 765, 102 S.Ct. 3348, 73 L.Ed.2d 1113 (1982) (upholding a similar state statute); Osborne v. Ohio, 495 U.S. 103, 111, 110 S.Ct. 1691, 109 L.Ed.2d 98 (1990) (same). These indirect regulations advance the goal of preventing the sexual exploitation of children by destroying the market for materials depicting such activity. See Osborne, 495 U.S. at 109, 110 S.Ct. 1691. In both the direct and indirect regulations, Congress has chosen to advance its interest in preventing the exploitation of minors by regulating materials depicting the exploitation of minors.
The regulation at issue in this case, § 2257, does not apply solely to child pornography. It applies to a class of materials much broader than those depicting what Congress ultimately seeks to prevent, and therefore does not seek to advance Congress’s ultimate goal directly, or even as directly as § 2252’s prohibitions on distribution, receipt, and possession of child pornography. Instead, Congress seeks to supplement these existing bans by imposing age-verification and record-keeping requirements on all visual depictions of actual sexually explicit activity, regardless of the age of the performers. In this regard, the means employed by § 2257 are distinguishable from, and significantly broader than, those employed by §§ 2251 and 2252.
According to the majority, § 2257 advances the interest of protecting minors from sexual exploitation in four ways. First, “[i]t ensures that primary producers of pornography confirm that performers are of age before filming them.” Majority Op. at 329-30. Second, “it permits secondary producers ... to ensure that the individuals depicted in their publications are of age.” Id. Third, “it prevents children from attempting to pass themselves off as adults.” Id. Finally, “it creates a compliance system in which law-enforcement officers not only can identify the performers depicted in magazines and movies and verify their ages but also can eliminate subjective disputes with producers over whether a model’s apparent age should have triggered an age-verification check.” Id. Thus, unlike the range of other statutes enacted to meet the same goal, § 2257 does not regulate child pornography directly. It is instead part of a larger regulatory scheme designed to stamp out the production of, and demand for, materials depicting the sexual exploitation of minors. In other words, to aid enforcement of a ban on unprotected speech, § 2257 regulates a broad category of protected speech, the vast majority of which receives First Amendment protection. See United States v. X-Citement Video, Inc., 513 U.S. 64, 72, 115 S.Ct. 464, 130 L.Ed.2d 372 (1994) (“[Njonobscene, sexually explicit materials involving persons over the age of 17 are protected by the First Amendment.”).
The key question is whether the means employed in § 2257 — imposing age-verification and record-keeping requirements on all who produce depictions of actual sexually explicit conduct, regardless of the performers’ ages — burdens substantially more speech than necessary to prevent the sexual exploitation of minors in child pornography. The majority believes that the universal age-verification and record-keeping requirements do not impose a burden on adults who wish to advertise in one of Connection’s magazines. According to the majority, because advertisers must give their records only to Connection and not to the general public, and because these advertisers are already submitting revealing *364photographs with their names and addresses, no “individuals would shy away from producing verification of their ages as well.” Majority Op. at 330-31. This ignores the individual defendants before us, the Does, whose speech has been chilled by their fear that the government will view their images as obscene and will prosecute them for obscenity. Given the vagueness historically associated with defining obscenity, this fear cannot be said to be irrational. See, e.g., Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184, 197, 84 S.Ct. 1676, 12 L.Ed.2d 793 (1964) (Stewart, J., concurring) (“I know it when I see it....”). Further, the majority vastly understates the difference between providing perfunctory contact information to a magazine to which one submits anonymous photos and providing government-issued photo identification which must be kept on file for government inspection and through which one can be identified by the government as a performer in sexually explicit images. As Judge Kennedy notes, the Court has previously recognized that individuals have an interest in anonymous speech. Watchtower Bible & Tract Soc’y of N.Y., Inc. v. Vill. of Stratton, 536 U.S. 150, 166-67, 122 S.Ct. 2080, 153 L.Ed.2d 205 (2002). Even the fact that many of the photographs may reveal the performers’ “physical identities [does] not foreclose our consideration of the [performers’] interest in maintaining their anonymity.” Id. at 167, 122 S.Ct. 2080.
The majority argues that identifying oneself to the public, as in Watchtower, is different than identifying oneself to Connection and the government. Majority Op. at 329-31. Although, as the majority notes, advertisers must provide Connection with a name and address, providing this contact information, which may be merely a post-office box, is different than providing government-issued photo identification, which may contain such information as one’s driver’s license number, physical address, and, of course, date of birth. Further, the statute requires that Connection keep these records, including a copy of the identification document, on file for inspection by the government “at all reasonable times.” § 2257(c). Watchtower makes clear that speakers have an interest in anonymity with respect to the government as well as the public at large, as “[t]he decision in favor of anonymity may be motivated by fear of economic or official retaliation, by concern about social ostracism, or merely by a desire to preserve as much of one’s privacy as possible.” 536 U.S. at 166, 122 S.Ct. 2080. To minimize this interest is to minimize the prohibitive effect § 2257 may have on adults who wish to advertise in Connection’s magazines. But, the majority argues, the ultimate goal of these advertisers is to make “connections” with other swingers, in which case they will have to “lift the veil of anonymity.” Majority Op. at 330-31. Again, Watchtower recognizes that revealing one’s physical appearance to members of the public is a protected interest and is very different from providing identification to the government. 536 U.S. at 166-67, 122 S.Ct. 2080. To be sure, Connection generally does not publish an individual advertiser’s contact information, but instead prints an identification code so that an interested reader can contact Connection, which will then forward the reader’s contact information to the advertiser, who can then choose whether to contact the reader. In any case, the advertiser chooses how much information to include in his or her advertisement. In this way, Connection’s process is designed to maintain the confidentiality of its advertisers. Even “facilitating a liaison,” Majority Op. at 330-31, would not require an advertiser to reveal his or her true identity to the person with whom the advertiser meets, much less give *365the advertiser’s fall name, physical address, date of birth, and driver’s license number. Revealing one’s sexual tendencies to the government is very different from revealing these tendencies to someone who has been chosen and pre-screened and is known to share these same tendencies. The majority’s attempts to minimize § 2257’s burden on protected speech thus fail.
Imposing this burden on Connection and its potential advertisers does not advance Congress’s goal of ending child pornography. The evidence in the record indicates that the vast majority of swingers are middle-aged and accordingly not at risk of being mistaken for minors, and the record contains no indication of swingers engaging in sexual exploitation of minors. Accordingly, in the vast majority of instances, applying § 2257’s age-verification and record-keeping requirements to this population does not advance the government’s interest in preventing child pornography, but instead operates to burden constitutionally protected speech without any corresponding benefit. Indeed, this is true of all visual depictions of actual sexually explicit activity involving performers who are clearly above the age of majority. Because a substantial portion of the burden on speech does not serve to advance the government’s asserted goal, § 2257 is not narrowly tailored to the government’s interest in preventing the sexual exploitation of minors in child pornography.
The Supreme Court’s opinion in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 535 U.S. 234, 122 S.Ct. 1389, 152 L.Ed.2d 403 (2002), bolsters this conclusion. There, the Court struck down a statute “extend[ing] the federal prohibition against child pornography to sexually explicit images that appear to depict minors but were produced without using any real children.” Id. at 239, 122 S.Ct. 1389. Although the Court there struck down the law on its face for overbreadth, the Court’s reasoning is instructive. Key to the Court’s conclusion was the fact that the speech at issue “record[ed] no crime and create[d] no victims by its production” and consequently was protected speech. Id. at 250, 122 S.Ct. 1389. The government nonetheless sought to justify its ban on this protected speech as a means to ban unprotected speech. The Supreme Court noted that such an “analysis turns the First Amendment upside down.” Id. at 255, 122 S.Ct. 1389. I agree. In the majority of instances, § 2257, like the statute at issue in Free Speech Coalition, burdens speech that is neither criminal nor unprotected, as a means of banning unprotected speech (namely, child pornography). I conclude that such a regulatory regime is not narrowly drawn, and accordingly I would hold that § 2257’s universal age-verification requirement is not narrowly tailored to the goal of curbing child pornography.2
To illustrate this point, Connection proposes a more-narrowly tailored regulation, modeling its proposal on the regime governing tobacco sales. According to Connection, store clerks are required to ask for identification whenever someone who appears under the age of twenty-six attempts to purchase tobacco products, even though it is legal to purchase such products upon turning eighteen. This regulatory scheme is designed to ensure that people who fall into the age range where they may or may not look old enough to buy tobacco are identified, while people *366who are clearly of-age are not inconvenienced. As the majority notes, Majority Op. at 331, the availability of a more tailored regulation does not, by itself, demonstrate that the regulation at issue fails the narrow-tailoring test, as intermediate scrutiny does not require that the regulation be the least restrictive means of achieving the government’s interest. The point here is that alternatives exist that will burden substantially less protected speech, yet advance the government’s asserted interest equally well, which is precisely why § 2257 is not narrowly tailored.
This is not to suggest that Congress must employ an analogous regulatory scheme, but rather to illustrate that it is possible to pursue an interest in identifying minors without burdening those who clearly are not minors. Additionally, a regulation similar to Connection’s proposal appears to tack more closely to Congress’s actual goal in passing § 2257. As the D.C. Circuit noted, “The 1988 Act was passed by Congress on the recommendation of the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography.” Am. Library Ass’n v. Reno, 33 F.3d 78, 81 (D.C.Cir.1994). More specifically, the Commission’s Recommendation 37 suggested that Congress “enact a statute requiring the producers, retailers or distributors of sexually explicit visual depictions to maintain records containing consent forms and proof of performers’ ages.” Final Report of the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography 138 (1986). The Commission recommended such legislation to deal with “pseudo child pornography,” which “involve[s] women allegedly over the age of eighteen who are presented in such a way as to make them appear to be children or youths.” Id. at 138 n. 459 (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). According to the Commission, pseudo child pornography created special concerns because it was difficult and sometimes impossible for law-enforcement officials to discern whether the performers were above the age of eighteen or actually were minors. The Commission recommended imposing age-verification and record-keeping requirements as a means to ensure that no minors were being exploited in actual child pornography that was passed off as pseudo child pornography. Id. at 140. A regulation modeled along the lines that Connection suggests would achieve this goal. Consequently, it is difficult to see why a universal age-verification requirement is beneficial. Because the goal of curbing child pornography would not “be achieved less effectively absent the regulation” of performers who are clearly adults, § 2257 is not narrowly tailored. Ward, 491 U.S. at 799, 109 S.Ct. 2746 (quoting Albertini, 472, U.S. at 689, 105 S.Ct. 2897).
The majority counters that such a regime would not eliminate the need for subjective determinations of age, which the majority argues would be made by producers untrained in age-verification. Majority Op. at 331-32. The majority does not explain, however, how Congress’s goals are advanced by total elimination of subjective determinations of age for middle-aged performers, when Congress actually is concerned with subjective determinations of age for only young-looking performers. How is this goal helped by a regime under which fifty-year-old individuals are required to submit photo identification before publishing a sexually explicit image of themselves? As the majority points out, subjective age determinations may be harder to make when the photo does not include the performer’s face, as in some of the advertisements in Connection’s magazines. Id. at 331-32. If this is the case, Congress could simply require photo identification when the performer’s face is not included in the image. The majority also *367is concerned that such a rule would leave the initial age determination up to the publishers themselves, who may not be trained in age determination. Id. at 331-32. But it is these publishers who will be punished if their determinations are incorrect, so that the ultimate enforcer will be the government. Regardless, these arguments are not aimed at the ultimate constitutionality of a universal age-verification requirement. Instead, they are arguments better addressed to a legislature attempting to draft a statute that would survive constitutional muster. It is not our place judicially to revise § 2257 or to tell Congress how to do so. Instead, I merely reiterate that § 2257 burdens substantially more protected speech than is necessary to advance Congress’s compelling interest in preventing the sexual exploitation of minors. Accordingly, § 2257 is not narrowly tailored and is, therefore, unconstitutional as applied to Connection and the Does.
Protection of children is a government interest of the highest order. Nonetheless, under the applicable precedent, the means that Congress chooses to advance this end must not burden substantially more speech than necessary. For the reasons stated in this opinion, § 2257 is unconstitutional as applied to Connection and the Does. Moreover, I agree with Judge Kennedy’s dissent that § 2257 is facially unconstitutional for overbreadth.

. In the interest of brevity, I refer to the universal age-verification and record-keeping requirements enforced under § 2257 and its applicable regulations as " § 2257.”

. Free Speech Coalition, of course, is distinguishable in that it banned certain protected speech, while § 2257 merely burdens the speech. This distinction, however, is not dis-positive. As noted above, the evidence in this case demonstrates that § 2257 places a substantial chill on certain types of expressive conduct and thus has an effect very similar to that of a flat ban.