California Internet Lewdness Law Upheld On August 3, 2000, the California Court of Appeals for the First Appellate District, Division Five, affirmed the conviction of defendant on two counts of attempting to distribute or exhibit lewd matter to a minor via the Internet(People). Why and how did this happen? The Court rejected defendant's Commerce Clause and First Amendment challenges to Cal. Pen. Code 288.2(b) which makes it a crime for every person "who, with knowledge that a person is a minor, knowingly distributes, sends, causes to be sent, exhibits, or offers to distribute or exhibit by electronic mail, the Internet ..., to a minor with the intent of arousing, appealing to, or gratifying the lust or passions or sexual desires of that person or of a minor, and with the intent, or for the purpose of seducing a minor, is guilty of a public offense and shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison or in a county jail. A person convicted of a second and any subsequent conviction for a violation of this section is guilty of a felony." Pursuant to an undercover investigation on the Internet, defendant initiated two "instant messages" with a detective posing as a 14 year old boy. During the electronic conversations, defendant sent photographs, made an offer to engage in specific sexual acts and invited the boy to meet him at his house. The Court held Section 288.2(b) did not violate the Commerce Clause because "no legitimate commerce would be burdened by penalizing the transmission of harmful sexual material to known minors in order to seduce them." Rejecting defendant's argument that the statute subjects Internet users to inconsistent regulations, the Appeals Court distinguished the instant statute from the law challenged in American Libraries Ass'n. v. Pataki, 969 F. Supp. 160 (S.D.N.Y. 1997). The Pataki Court held the New York statute violated the Commerce Clause because "The nature of the Internet, like that of rail and highway traffic, requires a 'cohesive national scheme of regulation so that users are reasonably able to determine their obligations.'"(United) Absent national regulations, according to Pataki, Internet users would be subject to inconsistent local statutes regulating the content of their communications. The California Appeals Court found determinative the "knowledge" and "intent" elements missing from the New York statute, but present in Section 288.2(b). The Court stated, "Only when the material is disseminated to a known minor with the intent to arouse the prurient interest of the sender and/or minor and with the intent to seduce the minor does the dissemination become a criminal act." The Court concluded that the prohibition against Internet use for these specifically defined and limited purposes does not burden interstate commerce by subjecting Internet users to inconsistent regulations. The Court also held that the statute does not regulate behavior occurring outside California, stating, "When Section 288.2(b) is harmonized with the entire California penal scheme, it does not effectively regulate activities beyond California. California prosecutes only those criminal acts that occur wholly or partially within the state...Section 288.2(b) makes no reference to place of performance, so courts must assume the Legislature did not intend to regulate conduct taking place outside the state." The Court refused to follow ACLU v. Reno, 217 F.3d 162 (3d Cir. 2000), where the Third Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the preliminary injunction enjoining the Child Online Protection Act, finding no single "contemporary community standard" in cyberspace. The effect of which, that Court held, would force a web site publisher to abide by the most restrictive and conservative community standards in order to avoid liability. According to the California Appeals Court, the instant law "avoids COPA's unconstitutional overbreadth by gauging whether the published material is harmful to minors on the narrow basis of "contemporary statewide standards." WORKS CITED: People v. HSU, No. A088201 http://www.producersconference.com/law/cases/internet_cases/indecent_cases/hsu.html United States District Court Eastern http://www.mediacoalition.org/cyberpsace%20engler%20permanent%20injunction.htm
The federal court rejected dismissed Franklin’s case, because Title IX did not allow for monetary relief, The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the court’s
On May 4, 1987 the Supreme Court released their 5-4 decision. The court had examined “whether in a prosecution for the sale of allegedly obscene materials, the jury may be instructed to apply community standards in deciding the value question.” The majority included Rehnquist, White, Powell, O’Connor and Scalia. It concluded: “Just as the ideas a work represents need not obtain majority approval to merit protection, neither, insofar as the First Amendment is concerned, does the value of the work vary from community to community based on the degree of local acceptance won.” The Court observed that only the first two prongs of the Miller Test were discussed in terms of applying community standards because they are questions of fact and therefore, subject to review under community standards. However, failure to mention community standards in the value portion of the test was not an error, but and emphasis that such measures were inept. The serious value element is subject to judicial review and is ultimately a question of the law; because a question of the law should not vary from community to community, a national or objective standard must pertain. The Court concluded, “The proper inquiry is not whether an ordinary member
In the case Lawrence v. Texas (539 U.S. 558, 2003) which was the United States Supreme Court case the criminal prohibition of the homosexual pederasty was invalidated in Texas. The same issue has been already addressed in 1989 in the case Bowers v. Hardwick, however, the constitutional protection of sexual privacy was not found at that time. Lawrence overruled Bowers and held that sexual conduct was the right protected by the due process under the Fourteenth Amendment. The effects of the ruling were quite widespread and led to invalidation of the similar laws throughout the United States that tried to criminalize the homosexual activity of adults which were acting in privacy. The case attracted much of the public attention and quite a large number of briefs were filed in the cases.
Constitutionally, the case at first appears to be a rather one-sided violation of the First Amendment as incorporated through the Fourteenth. The court, however, was of a different opinion: "...
The Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller is a controversial play of a typical American family and their desire to live the American dream “Rather than a tragedy or failure as the play is often described. Death of a Salesman dramatizes a failure of [that] dream” (Cohn 51). The story is told through the delusional eyes and mind of Willy Loman, a traveling salesman of 34 years, whose fantasy world of lies eventually causes him to suffer an emotional breakdown. Willy’s wife, Linda, loves and supports Willy despite all his problems, and continually believes in his success and that of their no good lazy sons, Biff and Happy. The play takes place in 1942, in Willy and Linda’s home, a dilapidated shack on the outskirts of a slum. Willy has spent his whole life teaching and believing that you can achieve success by your appearance and by making yourself as amiable as possible. Eventually Willy begins to fabricate stories at himself to be able to live with himself because he can’t meet his own expectations. He falls deeper into his lies, making himself and his family suffer for it. (Thesis). In the play Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller proves he is America’s social critic when he criticizes Willy’s relationship concerning his family, his lack of success in achieving his goals and his dreams along with his inner turmoil and personal collapse which result in suicide.
The jury in the Iowa Supreme Court convicted him of knowingly disseminating obscene material to a minor and required him to register as a sex offender.3 In the United States, seventeen states have enacted special sexting laws that outline what parties are culpable and the punishments for sending and receiving sexts to and from minors.... ... middle of paper ... ...
The state's attitude, while becoming more equally divided on the issue, has not changed significantly enough to overturn the law. An appeal was made to a three-person appeals panel, which upheld the law. A request for reconsideration of the decision made to the federal Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, which encompasses the geographic area of Florida, Georgia and Mississippi, was denied. This denial has allowed the ACLU to bring the case before the Supreme Court for consideration.
Since the internet has been available in schools and libraries in this country, there has been a debate about what should be accessible to users, especially minors. The amount of information disseminated on the world wide web is vast, with some sources valuable for scholarly and personal research and entertainment, and some sources that contain material that is objectionable to some (ie. pornography, gambling, hate groups sites, violent materials). Some information potentially accessible on the internet such as child pornography and obscenity is strictly illegal and is not protected under the First Amendment. Some information available on the internet that may be valuable to some is at the same time perceived to be worthless or potentially harmful to some. For libraries serving the public, there has been controversy on the issue of providing the internet, free of censorship or filtering, to users. While some librarians and their professional associations align with ideals of free and unfiltered access to all information provided by the internet, some feel that filtering internet content to exclude possibly objectionable materials is a reasonable measure to prevent potential harm to minors.
Wade. In this case, she filed a class action lawsuit arguing against the constitutionality of a Texas law that made it illegal to attempt or obtain an abortion except in cases where the pregnancy is determined to be fatal to the mother. The Supreme Court ruled in 1973 that the enforcement of a policy prohibiting women from having safe access to an abortion was unconstitutional. They found their grounding for this ruling in the fifth and fourteenth amendment that have to deal will due process, which they defined as being inclusive of a right to privacy. This was another step forward and away from the once prohibited actions made illegal by the Comstock act. Roth was in charge of operating a book business in New York and was accused and convicted of mailing obscene circulars that were supposedly in violation of the federally enforced obscenity statutes at the time. The Supreme Court decided in a 6-3 decision that obscenity was not constitutionality protected under the first amendment. They reasoned that the intention of the first amendment was not to defend and protect every form of expression especially those that do not carry with them any value of social
McCarthy, M. (2005). THE CONTINUING SAGA OF INTERNET CENSORSHIP: THE CHILD ONLINE PROTECTION ACT. Brigham Young University Education & Law Journal, (2), 83-101.
...d male, was charged with statutory rape in California and now claims that the State’s statute discriminates unconstitutionally against men only. But one detail that some people do not know about the law that is federal is that a state may provide punishment only for males to equalize deterrents to teenage pregnancy. He is claiming that, at the time of the crime, he was 17 years old and had sexual intercourse with a 16 year old female. And because of California’s statute that only criminalizes against males when acting in this behavior, and that the female was not charged with any crime, even though she was just as guilty as he was. Michael M now alleges that this disparity in the statutory rape laws is in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution (Michael M v. Superior Court of Sonoma County).
E-Jurisdiction (or the lack thereof)… At the beginning of a new century, the Internet Revolution is upon us. At the turn of the last century, when the Revolution was Industrial instead of Virtual, the courts and legislatures struggled to enact policies to keep pace with the changing times and technologies. Laws governing labor practices, trade practices, anti-trust regulations, and even intellectual property all developed in reaction to the surges of the new industrialized world. So too, in this new E-world, lawmakers are now attempting to quell the erosion wrought by the powerful Digital wave on our existing legal systems. Whether by adapting old mores to fit new paradigms, or by creating new standards with which to judge novel issues, lawmakers of the new millennium face overwhelming challenges in confronting the growing expanse of cyberspace. One such challenge is how to address the issue of Jurisdiction over disputes in a new global marketplace where the only boundaries are bandwidth. This paper will discuss some of the problems of E-Jurisdiction and present some possible solutions. "The unique nature of the Internet highlights the likelihood that a single actor might be subject to haphazard, uncoordinated, and even outright inconsistent regulation by states that the actor never intended to reach and possibly was unaware were being accessed. Typically, states' jurisdictional limits are related to geography; geography, however, is a virtually meaningless construct on the Internet." American Library Association v. Pataki, 969 F. Supp 160 (SDNY 1997). I. Problems with traditional jurisdiction analyses Traditionally, U.S. Courts have exercised jurisdiction only over those who h...
Potter, Andrea Erwin. “Sexting and Louisiana’s Punishment for the Children the Law Intends to Protect from Prosecution Under Child Pornography Statutes.” Family Law Quarterly 45.3 (2011): 419–442. Print.
in one day and by the time this fieldwork is handed in the data may
“Death of a Salesman,” written by Arthur Miller follows the story of Willy Loman as an aging traveling salesman and the hardships he encounters. Willy rarely saw his brother Ben and his father abandoned him at a young age, which results in him having an incomplete sense of approval. This abandonment, along with his self-absorbed personality, skews the way he handles situations and affects how he brings up his children. Willy drives himself mad by trying and failing to be as successful as those around him and is haunted by hallucinations of the people from his past. Willy’s abandonment during his childhood and his madness, which develops as a result of his own narcissistic personality, are closely connected and affect the people around him,