|
''Marcus v. Search Warrant'', , full title ''Marcus v. Search Warrant of Property at 104 East Tenth Street, Kansas City, Missouri'', is an ''in rem'' case decided by the United States Supreme Court on the seizure of obscene materials. The Court unanimously overturned a Missouri Supreme Court decision upholding the forfeiture of hundreds of magazines confiscated from a Kansas City wholesaler. It held that both Missouri's procedures for the seizure of allegedly obscene material and the execution of the warrant itself violated the Fourth and Fourteenth amendments' prohibitions on search and seizure without due process. Those violations, in turn, threatened the rights protected by the First Amendment. The case had begun in 1957, when the Kansas City Police Department vice squad raided the warehouse of a local news distributor and five newsstands. Officers seized dozens of publications, far beyond those which had started the investigation, since the search warrants were not specific. Less than half of the seized titles were ultimately found obscene and ordered to be burnt. Justice William Brennan wrote for the Court. He found the officers' conduct similar to that which had inspired the Founding Fathers to write the Fourth Amendment. He added that the Missouri Supreme Court had incorrectly applied an earlier Court holding in sustaining the forfeiture. The result was a system that operated as an effective prior restraint. Hugo Black, in a concurring opinion, joined by William O. Douglas restated his conviction that the Fourteenth Amendment applies all the rights protected by the Constitution to the states. ''Marcus'' broke ground in holding that First Amendment interests required an additional layer of procedure than other instances of seizure. It would figure prominently in later obscenity cases involving seizures, including one called ''Quantity of Books v. Kansas'', that explicitly tried to take its holding into account. After the Court settled on a definition of obscenity in the early 1970s, it continued to hear other cases on the issues first addressed in ''Marcus''. ==Background of the case== For most of American history, literary and artistic works depicting or even alluding to sexual acts and topics, or using profane language, had been banned from publication or distribution, often by both confiscation of the works themselves and criminal prosecution of all individuals involved, following the traditions of English common law on obscenity and statutes at the state and federal levels. At the same time, demand for such materials continued, and the laws were often widely flouted. No defendant or claimant in such an action had ever persuaded a court to entertain the argument that the First Amendment's guarantees of free speech and free expression barred them. That began to change during the 20th century, in response to social and cultural trends of greater tolerance for literature and art that depicted such proscribed material. In the landmark 1933 case ''United States v. One Book Called Ulysses'', Judge John M. Woolsey of the Southern District of New York ruled that James Joyce's novel ''Ulysses'', chapters of which had been held obscene over a decade earlier when published in a literary review, could not be barred from the United States purely on the basis of its language and content without considering its literary merit.〔''United States v. One Book Called Ulysses'', 5 F.Supp. 182 (S.D.N.Y., 1933).〕 Second Circuit judges Learned and Augustus Hand upheld Woolsey on appeal,〔''(United States v. One Book Entitled Ulysses, by James Joyce )'', 72 F.2d 705 (2nd Cir., 1934)〕 and the book, considered a masterpiece of modernist literature, could be freely published and sold. Censorship battles continued in the next decades over other works of literature and art, such as ''Lady Chatterley's Lover'', expanding to include films. In 1957, the Supreme Court finally considered a case arising from an obscenity prosecution, ''Roth v. United States''.〔''Roth v. United States'', .〕 William Brennan wrote for a 6–3 majority that upheld the criminal conviction but abandoned the century-old Hicklin test in favor of a narrower definition of obscenity. However, it did not settle the issue, and the Warren Court had to hear more cases arising from subsequent prosecutions in the next decade, during which the Sexual Revolution began a more direct challenge to social mores on the issue. Criminal trials for obscenity were becoming more frequent and more of a risk for local prosecutors. Civil libertarians rallied around the defendants, creating negative publicity and increasing the chance of acquittals. Convictions were struck down on appeal. Some local authorities decided to combat obscenity through the use of civil forfeiture of obscene material. In civil cases, they had a lower burden of proof, needing to show only by a preponderance of evidence that the material was obscene, with no actual person as a defendant. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Marcus v. Search Warrant」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|