Court Opinion

ID: 9696022
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 18:33:54.791453+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:20:18.004881
License: Public Domain

Clinton, J.,
dissenting.
I cannot agree with the majority opinion for reasons wholly unrelated to the issue of the First Amendment and obscenity. The judgment of conviction in this case was vacated and the cause remanded for further consideration in the light of Miller v. California, 413 U. *455S. 15, 93 S. Ct. 2607, 37 L. Ed. 2d 419, and other recent decisions of the United States Supreme Court.
Among other requirements, Miller holds that in order to be immune from constitutional infirmity the prohibited material must depict or describe “sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law.” (Emphasis supplied.) The court then gives the following examples of such specific definition:
“(a) Patently offensive representations or descriptions of ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated.
“(b) Patently offensive representations or descriptions of masturbation, excretory functions, and lewd exhibition of the genitals.”
Our present statute is without question inclusive of the specific descriptions and is broad enough to include the exhibition of the thoroughly foul films on which this prosecution was founded. I cannot agree with Judge McCown’s conclusion that the present statute is vague. No contention can reasonably be made that the defendant did not have notice that the films it displayed were prohibited by existing Nebraska law.
The problem presented by the vacation by the Supreme Court of the United States of our decision affirming the judgment of conviction in this case arises because if we are to comply with the Miller standards requiring specificity or description in the statute, we cannot, as Judge McCown correctly notes, merely construe our statute, we must rewrite it. If we are to do that then we violate the principle of separation of powers of our own Constitution by a completely unwarranted intrusion into the legislative domain. We have said many times in somewhat varying language that: “A court cannot, under the guise of its powers of construction, rewrite a statute, supply omissions, or make other changes.” Bessey v. Board of Educational Lands & Funds, 185 Neb. 801, 178 N. W. 2d 794.
*456. It is far more important that we adhere to our own salutary principles of statutory construction, which are a recognition of the fundamental constitutional doctrine of separation of powers, than that we defend the police power of the state by arbitrarily restricting the operation of the general words of our present statute. The preservation of the principle is far more important than whether the defendant pays a fine, the deterrent effect of which will be slight. The remedy, of course, is legislation, state and municipal, which describes with the specificity required by Miller the matters which the Legislature wishes to prohibit. That is for the legislative branch to determine and not for us.
Let not my position be misunderstood. I deplore what I believe to be the unwise intrusion by the Supreme Court of the United States into the areas historically within the police powers of the state. The protection of constitutional rights and the police power of the state are opposite' sides of the same legal coin. The problem of the courts in matters such as this always has been and always will be the balancing of interests protected by the Constitution and the necessities of protecting the common good .through the exercise of the police power.. In the matter of obscenity, which as the United States Supreme Court has always said is not protected by the First Amendment,. that court has, in my judgment, gotten the tension out of balance. But in this particular case we must, live with that maladjustment because under the supremacy clause of the. Constitution of the United .States .we are bound to observe the mandate of the Supreme Court which vacated the judgment herein.- ■
The statute is. unconstitutional under Miller for over-breadth. ■ We cannot remedy that overbreadth short of rewriting it. That we cannot do if we are to keep faith with the doctrine of separation- of powers and our-own long-followed principles, of statutory construction. The *457majority opinion seems to believe that we have received an apparent invitation from the Supreme Court of the United States to “authoritatively construe” the statute to make it constitutional. Such an “invitation” if that is what it is, cannot and ought not extend our admitted power to construe statutes to the point of rewriting them.
I would add a caveat to those who read the majority opinion. Do not rely on it as a general precedent in the matter of statutory construction.