Court Opinion

ID: 9445749
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 21:37:27.946563+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:30:23.779632
License: Public Domain

MARTIN, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
In my view, expressed in conference and in a proposed opinion before the majority opinion was written, the judgment of conviction and sentence in this case should be reversed and the case dismissed. It is true that the trial court erred in admitting the testimony of a psychiatrist concerning the effect these pictures would have, not only on normal males but also on sexual perverts, such as sadists and masochists, and on adolescent youth; and that the correct applicable test is what effect viewing pictures like those in evidence here would have on normal-minded people. See opinion of Judge Learned Hand in United States v. Levine, 2 Cir., 83 F.2d 156. Applying this test, I think these pictures would have no greater effect upon normal people than would the widely distributed magazine pictures of semi-clad females and similar pictures irrelevantly displayed on book covers and even on detective and murder-mystery novels. Each of the photographs exhibited in this case depicts a partly-clothed woman. None of them shows a front view of a completely nude female figure.
In a case decided recently [Alfred E. Butler v. State of Michigan, February *84625, 1957, 352 U.S. 380, 77 S.Ct, 524, 526, 1 L.Ed.2d 412], the Supreme Court reversed a conviction in a Michigan criminal court under a statute oí that state making it an offense for any person to make available for the general reading public a book which the trial judge found would have a deleterious influence upon youth. The Supreme Court rejected the insistence of the State of Michigan that, by thus quarantining the general public against books net too rugged for grown men and women in order to shield juvenile innocence, the state is exercising its power to promote the general welfare. Mr. Justice Frankfurter commented: “Surely, this is to burn the house to roast the pig.” The opinion concluded: “We have before us legislation not reasonably restricted to the evil with which it is said to deal. The incidence of this enactment is to reduce the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children. It thereby arbitrarily curtails one of those liberties of the individual, now enshrined in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, that history has attested as the indispensable conditions for the maintenance- and progress of a free society. We are constrained to reverse this conviction.” The principle of the Butler case bears true analogy here.
My opinion is not to be construed as placing approval upon the distribution of lascivious literature or pictures, but is limited to the facts encountered in the instant case, which, in my judgment, are inadequate to constitute a showing that appellant should be subject to the criminal sanctions of the federal statute under which he was indicted, tried and convicted. In a case tried by me, without the intervention of a jury, while sitting in the United States District Court at Pittsburgh, I convicted and sentenced to limit punishment a distributor of lewd, obscene and lascivious pictures. [United States v. Saxton]. But in the instant case, I cannot so classify the photographs exhibited in evidence. The judges of this court are in as good position as is the able trial judge to view the pictures and classify them as within or without the ban of the statute. Having carefully inspected the photographs, my conscience would not rest easily upon-sending, a person to jail for handling them.
My thought is that a new trial would' be a futile waste of time, money and effort. For my part, I could not, as-an appellate judge, vote to affirm a second conviction should one ensue. I think the case should be dismissed.