Adopting a stand urged by the College Art Association and other free-speech advocates, the U.S. Supreme Court today struck down a 1999 federal law intended to keep people from selling dogfighting videos or otherwise profiting from depictions of animal cruelty. In an 8-to-1 decision, the court held that the law banning depictions of animal cruelty was overly broad and threatened speech protected under the First Amendment. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. called “startling and dangerous” the federal government’s suggestion that whether speech is protected should be determined by weighing its value against its societal cost. The lone dissenter in the decision, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., said that the First Amendment does not protect the sort of violent criminal conduct that goes into making cruelty videos, and the harm caused by such crimes “vastly outweighs any minimal value that the depictions might conceivably be thought to possess.”
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It’s creepy when you find yourself in agreement with Justice Alito.
rmelton5 – Wow – exactly what I was thinking – of course, now my conservative friends can’t justifiably accuse me to knee-jerk responses to Alito’s decisions.
I probably have to agree with the “minority” here too. I can understand the free speech point, but by the same argument, it seems that child porn would also have to be legal, which I’m certainly glad it’s not.
If a person wants to make a “dog-fighting” video, that is okay with me as long as that person is the “bait” for the dogs to attack. Animal cruelty videos should NOT be protected by free speech. The animals are unable to “speak” for themselves — they should be protected.
Read the opinion, guys — it’s really the only reasonable decision, and the 8-1 majority is evidence of that. The law was intended to prohibit certain kinds of cruelty to animals, but it was written in a way that could also have been applied to many other things. It will be very easy for Congress to rewrite the law in a way that passes scrutiny. If the court had not overturned it, the precedent would have allowed all kinds of infringements of free speech. Given Alito’s track record, I have a feeling his dissent was motivated less by concern for animals than all the possibilities for speech restriction than an affirmation would have made raised.
Sometimes an undercover investigation is the only way to break open an animal cruelty case, be it at a research lab, a puppy mill, a dog fight, or a factory farm. The purpose of recording the cruelty is not to profit or to entertain, but to document the abuse for authorities. This is and should be completely protected by the First Amendment. It’s not child porn. It’s not a snuff film. It’s the documentation of a crime.