Court Opinion

ID: 9687901
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 16:52:50.895291+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:18:32.692797
License: Public Domain

Wilkie, J.
(concurring). Miller makes it indelibly clear that an appellate court such as ours must conduct an independent review of the determination of obscenity as made upon the trial of an obscenity action. The question is what the precise scope of that review must be. Mr. Chief Justice Hallows has spelled out the detailed scope of that review in his separate opinion to State ex rel. Chobot v. Circuit Court.1 I joined in that opinion to that extent and I would hold that the scope of our independent review, as controlled by the decisions of the United States Supreme Court, goes to each element involved in the determination of obscenity, to wit:
“. . . (a) whether ‘the average person, applying contemporary community standards’ would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest . . . (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” 2
As stated in my concurring opinion in Court v. State,3 “The determination of whether a particular publication is obscene is a mixed question of fact and constitutional *580law on which an appellate court is obliged to make an independent determination.” The nature and scope of the independent judicial review has been discussed in the United States Supreme Court decisions of Watts v. Indiana,4 Jacobellis v. Ohio,5 and others. That type of review has been made by the United States Supreme Court recently as to a Wisconsin obscenity case in Kois v. Wisconsin.6
I, therefore, conclude that our independent review here must be to each element of the determination of obscenity. This is precisely the type of independent review that I made in connection with our original consideration of Court. On this remand I would affirm because of my independent examination of the publications, pursuant to which I have found the publications obscene. This finding, of course, would certainly continue under the revised and less strict definition of obscenity as now promulgated by the United States Supreme Court under Miller.
I have been authorized to state that Mr. Chief Justice HALLOWS joins in this concurrence.

 (1973), 61 Wis. 2d 354, 372, 212 N. W. 2d 690.

 Miller v. California (1973), 413 U. S. 15, 24, 93 Sup. Ct. 2607, 37 L. Ed. 2d 419.

 (1971), 51 Wis. 2d 683, 711, 188 N. W. 2d 475.

 (1949), 338 U. S. 49, 69 Sup. Ct. 1347, 93 L. Ed. 1801.

 (1964), 378 U. S. 184, 84 Sup. Ct. 1676, 12 L. Ed. 2d 793.

 (1972), 408 U. S. 229, 92 Sup. Ct. 2245, 33 L. Ed. 2d 312. (State v. Kois (1971), 51 Wis. 2d 668, 188 N. W. 2d 467; (1972), 55 Wis. 2d 512, 200 N. W. 2d 615.)