Yesterday, the US Supreme Court rejected a ban on videos of animal cruelty. The question at hand was whether or not to strike down a federal law that made it a crime to create or sell dogfight videos and other depictions of animal cruelty. The case related to the prosecution of Robert J. Stevens, a self proclaimed “authority on pit bulls” who compiled and sold videos showing dog fights. He received a 37-month sentence under the 1999 federal law that was struck down by the Supreme Court yesterday which banned “depictions of animal cruelty.”

Apparently, although dog fights are illegal in all 50 states of the United States, it is not illegal to profit from footage of dog fights. The Supreme Court decided yesterday that showing footage of animals being tortured and mutilated constitutes the exercise of freedom of expression guaranteed under the first amendment. As if that decision weren’t incoherent enough per se, according to the New York Times:

The government argued that depictions showing harm to animals were of such minimal social worth that they should receive no First Amendment protection at all. Chief Justice Roberts roundly rejected that assertion. “The First Amendment means that government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter or its content,” he wrote.

This of course leads us to the obvious question, if you can’t restrict any form of freedom of expression what about, oh say, child pornography? But Chief Justice Roberts had an answer to that as well, according to him:

Child pornography, the chief justice said, is “a special case” because the market for it is “intrinsically related to the underlying abuse.”

The million dollar question here being: isn’t animal cruelty also related to “the underlying abuse”? Why else would we refer to it as cruelty if it wasn’t? For more on this, I recommend this New York Times article.

Related Post:
Will China Ban Dog and Cat Meat?