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Thursday, April 15, 2010
Both sides pleased with ruling on anti-porn law
Both sides declared victory on Thursday, April 15, after a federal appeals court ruling on a state law designed to protect children from pornography and predators on the Internet.
Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray had defended the law against challenges from booksellers and other groups.
The ruling concludes that the law is constitutional.
It is to be applied only to material sent through person-to-person communications such as e-mails and instant messages and not to material on generally accessible Web sites and public chat rooms when the person distributing the obscene material can’t stop a juvenile from seeing it.
“As the statute is limited to personally directed communications to a person that the sender knows or should know is a juvenile, we find that the statute does not violate the First Amendment as it is not unconstitutionally overbroad or vague and it survives strict scrutiny analysis,” the ruling from the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati said.
The court directed the U.S. District Court in Dayton to lift an injunction that had prohibited county prosecutors from enforcing the law.
“This will allow that law to finally be enforced, providing an important tool for local law enforcement and prosecutors as they combat sexual predators’ use of the Internet and other electronic communications to prey on our young people,” Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray said in a press release.
David Horowitz, director of the Media Coalition, Inc., which includes some of the plaintiffs in the case, in a press release called the ruling a “decision for free speech.”
The ruling said that the law, which imposes fines and prison terms for providing non-obscene, sexually-explicit material to minors, cannot be applied to communications on Web sites, in public chatrooms and through emailservers and mailing lists, Horowitz said.
The ruling came after the Ohio Supreme Court in January, at the request of the federal court, decided that Cordray was correct in interpreting that the law was to be narrowly, not broadly applied.
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