And we pay the salaries of those turds. Thats what happens when you get overeducated twats in a room wearing black robes. http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Supr...-animal-cruelty-dog-fighting/story?id=9536559 Pretty soon it will be alright to sodomize your daughters (against their will, I know many of them are already well served by request). Expression of free something or other will be the reason.
when the court rules 8-1 - you can bet a pretty important freedom was on the line. Freedom of speech is massively important. This court is doing a good job of pissing of the right and the left who are both trying to trample on the constitution.
No, the way the court sees this law you could film his sister being raped and then sell the film for profit. Only the person committing the rape would be guilty of anything. I agree, this ruling is a gross injustice of the law. It is not an exercise in protecting the freedom of speech, it is an affront to it.
People are protected by the Constitution. Animals are not. Filming/selling child abuse or any act of violence against a person is illegal because the vicitim has constitutionally guaranteed rights. Animals do not have rights, therefore their rights cannot be violated.
Interesting case that pitted law enforcement interests against free speech advocates. Of course, actual speech was not the issue but rather videos of dog fighting. I found the breakdown of the Justices interesting, as the liberals voted together and only Alito defected from the conservative side. You might have thought the libs would have been eager to expand governmental regulation of conduct. In this case the conduct was pretty horrendous, and one would think if you could ban something entirely, you could certainly ban selling videos of it being done. Apparently not. This was certainly not a core First Amendment value, selling dog fighting videos. Of course, the Court's liberals thought it was perfectly acceptable to ban a core First Amendment value, political speech, and supported numerous onerous restricitons on it. So the liberals on the Court find dog fighting more worthy of First Amendment protection than political speech. Classic. The conservatives' votes are easier to understand. In general, they are suspicious of government excuses to ban speech, and also are very aware of the slippery slope potential. Today dog fighting, tomorrow hate speech, day after tomorrow, racially insensitive speech or speech that hurts gays feelings. Honestly though, I thought Alito had the best of it. This was hard to distinguish from child pornography in the sense of it being exploitive and supportive of illegal activities. No core or even peripheral First Amendment issues were present.
I get your point but it is not totally correct. You can certainly film and sell videos of acts of violence against a person. Mixed martial arts wouldn't exist if that were true, but you can also broadcast acts of criminal violence. TV stations do it every day. What would be a problem is videoing yourself committing an act of violence and trying to profit from it. I'm not at all sure that would be protected under the First Amendment. The issue that complicated this case was that the guy who was selling the videos was not the guy who taped them apparently and also was not running illegal dog fights himself.
The contestants in mixed martial arts fights are willing participants. Therefore, no one is violating their rights. The news media blurrs out the faces of crime victims and generally only shows the faces of the perpetrators. If a TV news station tried to package the acts of violence into a video and sell them without protecting the identities of the victims, they could be prosecuted. You are correct that the man selling the videos was not a participant (owner, handler, promoter, etc.) in the dog fights and therefore could not be prosecuted under those laws.