Podcasts

Court rejects constitutional challenges to obscenity statutes in prosecution of adult website owner

By Evan Brown

U.S. v. Little, No. 07-170, 2008 WL 151875 (M.D. Fla. January 16, 2008)

The operator of the Max Hardcore website was indicted under 18 U.S.C. §§1462 and 1465 for distributing allegedly obscene video files which agents downloaded in Tampa, Florida. Max Hardcore moved to dismiss the indictment, raising a number of constitutional challenges to the prosecution. The court rejected each of the defendant?s arguments and denied the motion.

Statutes not facially unconstitutional

The court declined to accept the defendant?s argument that because of the evolving nature of substantive due process law, prior Supreme Court decisions upholding the federal obscenity statutes were no longer valid. It also refused the defendant’s argument that the constitutional right to privately posses obscene materials should translate into a corresponding right to distribute such material.

Statutes not unconstitutional as applied

The defendant also launched a couple of challenges to the application of the Miller test, set forth in the Supreme Court?s decision of Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15, 93 S.Ct. 2607 (1973). Under the Miller test, the finder of fact determines whether material is obscene by applying the following test: (a) Whether ?the average person, applying contemporary community standards’? would find that the work taken as a whole, appeals to 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.

Max Hardcore?s challenge to the Miller test dealt with the requirement that the works at issue be ?taken as a whole.? The defendants argued that because of the interconnected nature of the Web, it would be impossible to know what the term ?taken as a whole? means, and it would similarly be impossible to determine the community standards against which the works should be evaluated. At the very least, the defendant argued, the entire Max Hardcore site should be considered the work ?taken as a whole,? and not just the individual video files.

With little analysis, the court sided with the government, holding that the individual files ? and not the whole website ? should be the works ?taken as a whole.? And the court concluded that the absence of a universal community standard was okay. Citing to U.S. v. Bagnell, 679 F.2d 826 (11th Cir. 1982), it held that ?[i]t is constitutionally permissible to subject defendants in obscenity prosecutions to varying community standards of the various judicial districts into which they transmit obscene material.?

Full post as published by InternetCases.com on January 29, 2008 (boomark / email).