Dog Fight Videos Called Free Speech

[Divernan]

www.post-gazette.com

Dog fight videos called free speech
Thursday, October 26, 2006

By Paula Reed Ward, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The lawyer for a man convicted of distributing videos of dog fighting in the first case of its kind in the country argued to an appeals court yesterday that what her client sold was an expression of free speech."This is not a case about animal cruelty," said Karen S. Gerlach, the public defender handling the appeal. Instead, she told a three-judge panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that Robert J. Stevens was the target of an overly broad criminal statute designed to target sexual fetishists.
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Mr. Stevens, of Pittsville, Va., was the first defendant in the country to go to trial on the charges. He was convicted in January 2005 in U.S. District Court in Pittsburgh of three counts of selling videos that depicted animal cruelty and was sentenced to 37 months in prison.
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The law under which he was convicted -- it was enacted in 1999 -- was designed to stop the making of so-called "crush" videos, which depict women in high heels crushing small animals. The videos apparently appealed to some fetishists.However, her client's case has nothing to do with "crush" videos or prurient sexual interest, Ms. Gerlach said.
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"The statute is penalizing people several steps down the line -- people who had nothing to do with animal cruelty," she said. "There's no evidence he ever hurt an animal, tried to hurt an animal, fostered it or encouraged it." The videos in question were taken either in Japan, where dog fighting is legal, or in the United States before it was outlawed. Ms. Gerlach also noted that the law provides an exception for videos that have scientific, educational or historical value. She claims that the prosecution did not prove that was lacking in Mr. Stevens' case.

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My comments: As a lawyer, it sickens me that the grossly underfunded Public Defenders' system is putting scarce assets into pursuing this appeal - of a man who admitted to committing these acts, but is trying to get out on a narrow interpretation of a statute - when they could be representing abused elderly, men, women & children; and physically abused and neglected prisoners, nursing home residents, etc. instead. What's that, Grandma - you've gotten senile and forgot to pay your utility bill and Duquesne Light cut your power in January? Too bad, so sad - we're busy defending some schmuck who profits from films of dogfights.

On Edit: If I were a recruiter for one of those soulless Big Insurance or Big Pharma corporations with their own in house law departments, I would be very interested in hiring this young "public defender". Someone who can argue with a straight face that promoting films of dogfighting is NOT fostering or encouraging dogfighting is just the kind of lawyer who will do right by such corporations.