Animal Cruelty Law Voided by Supreme Court
U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts
Dennis Brack/Bloomberg
U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts poses during the court's official photo session in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 29, 2009.
U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts poses during the court's official photo session in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 29, 2009. Photographer: Dennis Brack/Bloomberg
The U.S. Supreme Court struck down a federal criminal law aimed at depictions of animal cruelty, saying the measure was so broad it would have outlawed hunting videos and magazines in violation of free-speech rights.
The high court, voting 8-1, overturned the conviction of a Virginia man for selling videos of pit bulls fighting each other and attacking other animals.
Congress passed the law to target “crush videos,” in which women stomp on small animals with their feet in a manner that some people find sexually arousing.
Writing for the court, Chief Justice John Roberts said the language of the law went much further, creating “a criminal prohibition of alarming breadth.”
Justice Samuel Alito dissented, saying the ruling effectively legalized the sale of crush videos and “is thus likely to spur a resumption of their production.” He said the animals in crush videos “are living creatures that experience excruciating pain.”
Roberts said the court wasn’t deciding whether Congress could pass a law limited to crush videos and other depictions of “extreme” animal cruelty. The government has brought at least three prosecutions under the 1999 law, none involving a crush video.
The law covered interstate, commercial trafficking in depictions of animal cruelty. The measure contained an exception for items that have “serious religious, political, scientific, educational, journalistic, historical or artistic value.”
Catching Prey
The man challenging the law, Robert J. Stevens, describes himself as a book author and documentary film producer who specializes in promoting pit bulls.
Stevens says his small business sells educational material about the breed, including a video that documents the use of pit bulls to help hunters catch prey. The video shows a pit bull fight in Japan, a scene that Stevens says is used to distinguish dogs trained for hunting from those trained for fighting.
Stevens was indicted after law enforcement officials bought three videos from him through the mail. He was convicted and sentenced to three years and one month in prison. A federal appeals court said Stevens couldn’t be convicted because the law was unconstitutional.
The prosecution of Stevens “is itself evidence of the danger in putting faith in government representations of prosecutorial restraint,” Roberts wrote.
Alito said he would have upheld the statute and sent the case back to a lower court to determine whether it could be constitutionally applied to Stevens.
Administration Setback
The Obama administration argued unsuccessfully that depictions of extreme animal cruelty, like obscenity and child pornography, are categorically excluded from the protections of the First Amendment.
Roberts rejected that reasoning, saying past high court cases “cannot be taken as establishing a freewheeling authority to declare new categories of speech outside the scope of the First Amendment.”
Roberts faulted the law for criminalizing depictions of conduct that is illegal in only a single jurisdiction. He pointed to the ban on hunting in the District of Columbia.
“The demand for hunting depictions exceeds the estimated demand for crush videos or animal fighting depictions by several orders of magnitude,” Roberts said, citing a brief filed by the National Rifle Association.
“Nonetheless, because the statute allows each jurisdiction to export its laws to the rest of the country,” the law “extends to any magazine or video depicting lawful hunting, so long as that depiction is sold within the nation’s capital,” he said.
The case is United States v. Stevens, 08-769.
To contact the reporter on this story: Greg Stohr in Washington at gstohr@bloomberg.net.
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