United States V. Extreme Associates - Legal Aspects and Implications

Legal Aspects and Implications

Quotations from the appellate ruling:

• the Supreme Court explicitly admonished lower courts that "f a precedent of this Court has direct application in a case, yet appears to rest on reasons rejected in some other line of decisions, the Court of Appeals should follow the case which directly controls, leaving to this Court the prerogative of overruling its own decisions even as the Court in Agostini concluded that its own adherence to the old precedent "would undoubtedly work a 'manifest injustice'" in light of later decisions, it emphasized that "the trial court acted within its discretion in entertaining the motion with supporting allegations, but it was also correct to recognize that the motion had to be denied unless and until this Court reinterpreted the binding precedent."
• " right to receive is not a right to the existence of modes of distribution of obscenity, which the State could destroy without serious risk of infringing on the privacy of a man's thoughts; rather, it is a right to a protective zone ensuring the freedom of a man’s inner life..."
• "In Orito, for example, the defendant was prosecuted under § 1462 for privately transporting obscene material in interstate commerce (to wit, knowingly carrying obscene materials in his private luggage on a domestic commercial flight). Orito "moved to dismiss the indictment on the ground that the statute violated both his First and Ninth Amendment rights." ... In dismissing the indictment, the Supreme Court explained that the District Court had misinterpreted not only Stanley, but also Griswold to establish constitutional protection for the non-public transportation of obscene material ... we have declined to equate the privacy of the home relied on in Stanley with a 'zone of privacy' that follows a distributor or a consumer of obscene materials wherever he goes."
• "We conclude that the Supreme Court has analyzed and upheld the federal statutes regulating the distribution of obscenity under the constitutional right to privacy embodied collectively in the First, Ninth, and Fourteenth (thus also the Fifth) Amendments, as well as the Griswold line of decisions that the District Court asserted should control this case. The fact that such analysis has never been applied within the precise scenario outlined by the District Court – i.e., use of the talismanic phrase "substantive due process" in the context of a vendor proceeding under derivative standing on behalf of a consumer’s right to privately possess obscene material – does not negate the binding precedential value of the Supreme Court cases employing that analysis. The Court’s analysis need not be so specific in order to limit a district court’s prerogative to overturn an entire category of federal statutes, even as applied to particular defendants, based on speculation about a later decision that fails even to mention those statutes. The Court has considered the federal statutes regulating the distribution of obscenity in the context of the broader constitutional right to privacy and upheld them. That such analysis was conducted absent its constitutional brand name does not negate its precedential value."
• "It was therefore impermissible for the District Court to strike down the statutes at issue based on speculation that Orito and other pivotal obscenity cases "appear to rest on reasons rejected in" Lawrence... Even if there were analytical merit to such speculation, an issue on which we do not opine, the constraint on lower courts remains the same. The possibility that Lawrence has "somehow weakened the precedential value of" the Reidel line of cases is irrelevant for purposes of ruling on the instant indictment."