‘Text-Only’ Web Obscenity Case Attracts National Attention
Gina Passarella reports on the case of U.S. v. Fletcher, (W.D. Penn.) in the Legal Intelligencer (2.5.2008):
Motions to dismiss said obscenity laws should not be applied to text where no pictures were involved. . .
. . . The two motions to dismiss presented a strict scrutiny argument and said obscenity laws should not be applied to text where no pictures were involved. Walters said there hasn’t been a case that has applied obscenity laws to text since the U.S. Supreme Court refined the test for obscenity in its 1973 case Miller v. California.
The three-pronged Miller test requires that an average person using contemporary community standards would find that the work only appeals to prurient interests, that it depicts sexual conduct as defined by state law and that it lacks "serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value," according to court documents . . .
Howard Bashman is reporting on Passarella’s article in the How Appealing blog and reminds us of his 2006 article: Text This: Words Alone Can Violate Federal Obscenity Laws. In that article, he cites a couple of federal court of appeals cases that support text only obscenity prosecutions.
Bashman’s article was mentioned in the October 2006 issue of the Community Defense Reporter (CDR). Visit the CDR index and subscribe to it here.