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Supreme Court Declines to Hear Obscenity Case
Justice is reporting that Monday the Supreme Court declined to hear the obscenity case of Nitke v. Gonzales. From the article: "Even in our federal system of government, the law concerning obscenity is a legal oddity. A photograph that in New York would be considered protected speech under the First Amendment could in Alabama be considered obscene, making the photographer and distributors subject to felony charges. That's a consequence of the Supreme Court's landmark 1973 case, Miller v. California, in which the court ruled that obscenity was essentially a subjective judgment, and called for prosecutors, judges and juries to apply 'community standards' in determining what speech was obscene and what was protected. In the age of the Internet, a new issue has been raised - if something considered free speech in New York is accessible in Alabama, where it's considered obscene, what standard should be used? By rejecting the case, the Supreme Court has left that question open."
I actually bothered to read the entire article, and the supreme court decision here was basically no decision. What the lower court stated, was that the plaintiff (the artist) had actually failed to show cause. She failed to actually demonstrate that she was actually being effected or restricted by the current laws of the land. While it was certainly true that the there could be constitutional conflicts in the decency,free speech, and federal child protection laws, the court always fails to intervene in the laws until somebody can show ACTUAL damage (not perceived damage). Often the standards of this don't have to TOO high, but the court needs to have some belief that a law passed by congress or a state actually DOES conflict with a constitutionally protected right of an living and breathing individual person before they will even CONSIDER the case. The plaintiff failed to this in the eyes of the lower court, and the supreme court agreed with that decision. So while it's TRUE that it still leaves the actual decision wide open, it DOESN'T mean that the court has made a decision in either direction in this case. So people who think they have are responding to more legal FUD. If there was an ACTUAL artist, who posted something on a NYC website that was legally protected, was then prosecuted by a local community somewhere else, then we would suddenly have a case that the courts might rule on. And then everybody on both sides would have a real case to argue about. The plaintiff failed to show whether this had even happened yet, so the court dismissed the case. The Supreme court agreed with the lower court's reason for dismissing the case. 'Nuff said.