The case Richard Pope and Charles Morrison v Illinois [1987] US 497 was heard before the State Appellate Court. Glenn A. Stanko was the advocate for the petitioner and Sally Louise Dilgart is the advocate for the respondent.
In 1983, July 21, the police detective Illinois in Rockford, bought magazines from Charles Morrison and Richard Pope who were the attendants in an adult bookstore. Both of them were charged for selling obscene magazines under the Illinois’s obscenity statute. Both Morrison and Pope moved the court to dismiss the charges on the ground that the obscenity statute was unconstitutional under the Fourteenth and the First Amendment. The amendments did not require that the work value should be judged as per objective basis whereas the judgment was made on contemporary community standards ((Chute, 2016).
The Trial courts denied the appeals and instructed the juries to decide whether the adults in Illinois would observe the material in the magazines as obscene. On appeal made by Pope and Morrison, the Illinois Appellate Court, Second District, agreed with the ruling made by the lower courts. However, the Supreme Court dissented and rejected the review.
The case of Pope v Illinois [1987] expands the standards set by the case Miller v California and determines whether a work has artistic, literary, political or scientific value in obscenity cases. In 1973, the Supreme Court decided Miller v California and had established three-prong test for deciding whether any particular material was obscene. The test asks whether any reasonable person would find artistic, literary, political or scientific material in question to be obscene (Farrant, 2017). Therefore, obscenity cases deals with value and it is not about taste. The test established in the case was to determine whether any work describes sexual conduct in a offensive manner and whether the work of the material lacked ‘serious literary, artistic, scientific or potential value’.
The court held that it is important to determine whether a reasonable person would find any serious artistic, literary, political or scientific value in any obscene material when the entire the material is taken into consideration. The Supreme Court held while determining the issue in the Pope’s case that it is important to apply an objective national standard which any reasonable person would use to determine the value in question. The case has established the principle that in order to assess whether any material is obscene, the value of the material should be determined based on whether the average American consider the work value to be obscene instead of assessing the work value of the material based on personal opinion of the Americans.
Consequently, the use of national reasonable person standard would lead to an outcome that is distinct from using a local standard to assess whether the material is obscene. Justice Scalia agreed to the fact that the test established in the Miller’s test was required to be adjudicated on the basis of whether any reasonable person would find the material valuable. Justice Harry A. Blackmun partially dissented with the judgment on the ground that the ‘harmless error’ analysis proposed by the majority was inappropriate. However, the opinion of the majority with respect to the protection of a work from being judged only by the value of the work was appropriate (Hoppeler, Rippl & Schweighauser, 2013).
Justice John Paul Stevens dissented with the judgment with respect to the ground of unconstitutionality raised by Pope and Morrison. He argued that the error in this case was harmful as the jury assessed their guilt based on unconstitutional directions. He further argued that the majority opinion reflected clarification of the definition of the term ‘obscenity’ ho believed that the view of a majority on the value of material work was more valuable than the view of minority with respect to the work material value.
When a jury is directed to assume malice from the arguments presented regarding the facts of the case, the jury is required to find the existence of the facts, agreeing unanimously beyond any reasonable doubt. In the present case, the jurors were not precluded from having regards to the question of value They were instructed to find that the magazines sold by the petitioners had no social value tha(Grey, 2015). t could be redeemed in order to establish that the magazines were obscene. Although this case has set the new standard for the cases related to obscenity, it is still vague. This is because there are various definitions of the phrase ‘reasonable person’ and the concept of ‘serious value’ is vague because of the several elements that vary from one’s background to another’s background.
Conclusion:
The State Appellate confirmed the convictions of both the petitioners by rejecting their contention on the ground that the issue related to value shall be determined objectively instead of being determined on the basis of contemporary community standards. In this case, the Illinois Appellate Court did not consider the harmless-error related issues which must be determined by the court.
To
Liz Goldman
WebEx
New York, HQ
Respected Ma’am,
I have prepared a memorandum entailing all the relevant cases, laws and other information related to your queries regarding the publication of the batman comic and games. You were keen to know whether the inclusion of obscenity, indecency and porn would augment any issue regarding the publication of the comic. The following memorandum includes all the related information about the publication of the comic.
Reference:
Bongco, M. (2014). Reading comics: Language, culture, and the concept of the superhero in comic books. Routledge.
Burchill, J. (2015). Dick Tracy gets smacked down: comic crimes in Manitoba. Manitoba History, (77), 28-36.
Castillo v Texas (79 S.W. 3d 817 (Tex. 2002)
Chute, H. L. (2016). Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Harvard University Press.
Duncan, R., Smith, M. J., & Levitz, P. (2015). The power of comics: History, form, and culture. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Farrant, F. (2017). Comics and the Gothic. In Crime, Prisons and Viscous Culture (pp. 103-124). Palgrave Macmillan UK.
Greenberg, M. H. (2014). Comic art, Creativity and the Law. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Grey, H. (2015). Comic Art, Creativity and the Law.
Haapio, H., Plewe, D. A., & deRooy, R. (2017). Contract Continuum: From Text to Images, Comics, and Code.
Hoppeler, S., Rippl, G., & Schweighauser, P. (2013). Continuity in Comic Books and Comic Book Continuity: Serialized US-American Comic Books of the 1980s (Doctoral dissertation, University of Bern).
Miller v California 413 U.S. 15
Morrison v Illinois [1987] US 497
Sheerin, J. B. (2016). Censorship in Contemporary Society. The Catholic Lawyer, 3(4), 4.
Stallings, J. (2014). The gathings committee: Censorship, society, and paperback literature in the 1950s (Doctoral dissertation, University of Arkansas at Little Rock).
Steel, C. M. (2014). Digital child pornography: A practical guide for investigators. Lily Shiba Press.
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