Crush Porn 2

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Animal cruelty…a nationwide fad and a Supreme Court case
January 17th, 2009

In Wisconsin, we’ve got snowmobilers who get their jollies using their machines to bravely and cruelly slay deer and ducks.

But Wisconsin isn’t the only place where sickos get their jollies by seeing animals in pain. It seems there is a certain segment of the population that gets a sexual kick out of seeing small animals crushed underfoot. The Supreme Court will decide whether depicting that crushing act is free speech or should be prohibited.

From the New York Times:
A decade ago, Congress decided it was time to address what a House report called “a very specific sexual fetish.” There are people, it turns out, who take pleasure from watching videos of small animals being crushed.
“Much of the material featured women inflicting the torture with their bare feet or while wearing high-heeled shoes,” the report said. “In some video depictions, the woman’s voice can be heard talking to the animals in a kind of dominatrix patter. The cries and squeals of the animals, obviously in great pain, can also be heard in the videos.”

So, in 1999, Congress made it a crime to sell “crush videos” and almost all other depictions of unlawful cruelty to animals.

The conduct itself is disgusting, of course. But the law does not criminalize the cruelty, which was already illegal in all 50 states, only its depiction. By making such expressions illegal — adding a new category of speech to the very few that are entirely unprotected under the First Amendment — the law raised profound constitutional questions about whether and when the government can decide that some sorts of information have no social value at all.

The Supreme Court is likely to address those questions soon in the case of Robert J. Stevens, a Virginia man sentenced to 37 months in prison under the law for selling videos of dogfights.

Maybe now we know why those Wisconsin yahoos did what they did.

TITLE 18 > PART I > CHAPTER 3 >
§ 48Prev Next § 48.
Depiction of animal cruelty
(a) Creation, Sale, or Possession.— Whoever knowingly creates, sells, or possesses a depiction of animal cruelty with the intention of placing that depiction in interstate or foreign commerce for commercial gain, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.
(b) Exception.— Subsection (a) does not apply to any depiction that has serious religious, political, scientific, educational, journalistic, historical, or artistic value.
(c) Definitions.— In this section—
(1) the term “depiction of animal cruelty” means any visual or auditory depiction, including any photograph, motion-picture film, video recording, electronic image, or sound recording of conduct in which a living animal is intentionally maimed, mutilated, tortured, wounded, or killed, if such conduct is illegal under Federal law or the law of the State in which the creation, sale, or possession takes place, regardless of whether the maiming, mutilation, torture, wounding, or killing took place in the State; and
(2) the term “State” means each of the several States, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and any other commonwealth, territory, or possession of the United States.