SCOTUS Rejects Animal Cruelty Video Law

[Pangloss]

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2010/0420/Supreme-Court-rejects-animal-cruelty-law-upholds-free-speech

 

The Supreme Court overturned a lower-court ruling by an 8-1 vote, so videos of animal cruelty are now legal.

 

The one dissent came not from one of the liberal justices but from one of the Bush conservatives -- Alito -- who said he felt it should have instead been referred back to a lower court.

 

I agree with this ruling in terms of consistency with free speech and the constitution. Perhaps there's some other way we can stop this sort of thing, but I think we have bigger fish to fry.

 

 

 

 

(sorry, couldn't resist)

[iNow]

...so videos of animal cruelty are now legal.

 

From what I understand, it was more about how the law was written. I read a good write-up this morning while sipping my coffee.

 

 

http://www.scotusblog.com/2010/04/first-amendment-left-intact/

The Court noted that it had previously withdrawn “a few historic categories” of speech from the First Amendment’s shield, but concluded that “depictions of animal cruelty should not be added to the list.” The decision nullified a 1999 federal law passed by Congress in an attempt to curb animal cruelty by forbidding its depiction. That law, the Court said, sweeps too broadly.

 

The Court, in an opinion written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., stressed that it was not restricting the power of government to punish actual acts of animal cruelty, and it noted that such prohibitions have “a long history in American law” and now are on the books in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. But it said there was no similar history behind Congress’s attempt to ban video or other portrayals of acts of cruelty to living creatures.

 

<...>

 

While the Court conceded that Congress had passed the law to try to stop interstate trafficking in so-called “crush videos,” showing the actual killing of cats, dogs and other small animals by stomping or other intensely cruel methods, it said the resulting law itself reached far more than that kind of portrayal. Limiting the law’s reach to those depictions, the opinion said, would require the Court to give “an unrealistically broad reading” to the exceptions Congress wrote into the law.

 

As written, the Court said, the law “creates a criminal prohibition of alarming breadth.” Noting that the government had given assurances that it would enforce the law only against commercial portrayals of “extreme cruelty,” the Chief Justice wrote that the Court would not uphold an unconstitutional law “merely because the government promises to use it responsibly.”

 

 

Regarding Alito's dissent:

 

Justice Alito, in dissent, argued that the Court should not have used the overbreadth approach, but rather should have analyzed the 1999 law as it was enforced specifically against Roberts Stevens in this particular case — that is, the law as applied to this set of facts. While disagreeing with his colleagues that the law swept too broadly, Alito said that the Court should have sent the case back to the Third Circuit to decide whether Stevens’ videotapes were illegal under the law.

 

The Chief Justice’s opinion for the Court said explicitly that the Justices were not deciding whether the Constitution would allow a law that was limited only to “crush videos” or “other depictions of extreme animal cruelty.” Justice Alito, however, said that the Court opinion “tacitly assumed for the sake of argument” that such laws would be valid.

 

Alito’s dissent suggested that the federal law should be interpreted in a way that would save its constitutionality — for example, by concluding that the law simply did not apply to any depictions of hunting. “I do not have the slightest doubt that Congress…had no intention of restricting the creation, sale, or possession of depictions of hunting,” he wrote. He added that other activities the Court found could be covered by the sweeping law could be put beyond the law’s reach by including them under the exceptions clause of the statute.

 

On the broader question of what categories of expression should be put outside the First Amendment’s protection, Justice Alito argued that “crush videos” should not be shielded “because they are so closely linked with violent criminal conduct,” which itself gets no constitutional protection.