Selling dog-fighting videos
Pittsville, VA (US)Incident Date: Saturday, Feb 14, 2004
County: Pittsylvania
Charges: Felony CTA
Disposition: Acquitted
Person of Interest: Robert Stevens
Case Updates: 4 update(s) available
Stevens is the first person to be tried under a 1999 federal animal cruelty statute.
As the trial opened Jan 11, 2005, the lawyer for Robert Stevens of Virginia, said the dog fight videos, including one of pit bulls attacking hogs, are protected under the law because the depictions of "old-time dog fights" have historical value.
Stevens' lawyer, Michael Novaro, does not dispute that Stevens sold the tapes. But he said the first case under the law banning the interstate transfer of videos showing animal cruelty ignores an exemption for videos with "religious, political, scientific, educational, journalistic, historical or artistic value."
Novaro also said the tapes do not violate the statute's intent to prevent "wanton cruelty to animals designed to appeal to a prurient interest in sex."
President Clinton signed the law after complaints about videos in which small animals were pictured being crushed under the feet of women wearing spiked heels. Novaro said the sexual description doesn't apply to Stevens' fight montage videos and a video that shows pit bulls attacking hogs.
The prosecutor, Stephen Kaufman, said in court filings that all 50 states have banned dog fighting and society has "a strong interest in the humane treatment and protection of animals, including dogs trained to fight other dogs and hogs."
Stevens is being tried in Pittsburgh because he sold the tapes to Pennsylvania State Police and U.S. Department of Agriculture agents. He faces up to 15 years in prison and $750,000 in fines if convicted.
Case UpdatesIn a setback for the animal rights movement, a U.S. appeals court Friday struck down on free-speech grounds a federal law that made it a crime to sell videos of dog-fighting and other acts of animal cruelty.
All 50 states have laws against the abuse of animals, the appeals court said, but "a depiction of animal cruelty" is protected by the 1st Amendment.
The ruling overturns a Virginia man's 2005 conviction, the nation's first under the law. Robert J. Stevens of Pittsville, Va., advertised and sold two videos of pit bulls fighting each other and a third showing the pit bulls attacking hogs and wild boars.
He sold the videos to federal agents in Pittsburgh, and was convicted and given three years in prison.
In Friday's decision, the appeals court in Philadelphia, by a 10-3 vote, said it was not prepared to "recognize a new category of speech that is unprotected by the 1st Amendment."
Acts of cruelty to animals "warrant strong legal sanctions," the appeals court said, but it ruled unconstitutional the effort to criminalize for-profit depictions of animal cruelty.
Congress passed the law in 1999 in hopes of eradicating the trade in animal cruelty videos. Because the videos rarely showed people who could be identified, state prosecutors often could not prove where the videos were made.
The law also was designed to stop so-called crush videos. According to a congressional report cited by the court, these are "depictions of women inflicting torture [on animals] with their bare feet or while wearing high-heeled shoes."
The law itself spoke broadly. It called for up to five years in prison for anyone who "creates, sells or possesses a depiction of animal cruelty" for the purpose of making money. This includes the showing of a "living animal" being "maimed, mutilated, tortured, wounded or killed."
The key issue for the appeals court was whether animal cruelty could be considered as akin legally to the sexual abuse of children.
Usually, videos and photographs are protected as free speech, even if they show illegal or abhorrent conduct. But in 1982, the Supreme Court made an exception for child pornography, ruling that sexual depictions of children could be prosecuted as a crime despite the 1st Amendment. This was the only way to wipe out such abuse of children, the high court said.
Government lawyers said the animal cruelty law should be upheld on the same basis. It was needed to stop the abuse of animals for profit, they said.
The appeals court disagreed. "Preventing cruelty to animals, although an exceedingly worthy goal, simply does not implicate interests of the same magnitude as protecting children from physical and psychological harm," wrote Judge Brooks Smith of the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals.
The three dissenters said the law should have been upheld to help in "protecting animals from wanton acts of cruelty."
Separately, the law has been challenged in Florida by a company that broadcasts cockfights from Puerto Rico over the Internet.
The Justice Department had no reaction Friday to the ruling. Normally, however, the government appeals to the Supreme Court when a federal law is struck down as unconstitutional.
In May, the high court repeated its view that the government has broad power to prosecute those who traffic in child pornography. The justices rejected a free-speech challenge to a stronger anti-pornography law that targets online predators. That measure makes it a crime to offer or solicit child sex images via a computer, even if no money or actual pornography is involved. The court upheld the law in a 7-2 decision. | Source: LA TImes - July 19, 2008
Update posted on Jul 19, 2008 - 9:04AM |
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 that what her client sold was an expression of free speech.
"This is not a case about animal cruelty," said Karen Gerlach, the public defender handling the appeal. Instead, she told a three-judge panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Wednesday that Robert Stevens was the target of an overly broad criminal statute designed to target sexual fetishists.
The court took the matter under advisement and will issue an opinion at a later date.
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.
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, Gerlach said.
Because of that, she claims that the videos are a protected form of free speech. The only exceptions to First Amendment protections include words that are lewd, obscene, profane, libelous, insulting or fighting words.
None of those descriptions are applicable in her client's case, Gerlach said. She also argued that the law her client was convicted under targeted the wrong person.
"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.
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 Stevens' case.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Eberhardt dismissed that notion.
In addition, he argued to the appeals court that the statute is not overly broad, in that it seeks to punish those who profit from the commercial sale of depictions of animal cruelty.
That, the prosecutor said, is exactly what Stevens was doing in this case.
The government's compelling interest - which is required to override the First Amendment protection to free speech - is to prohibit animal cruelty, Eberhardt said.
In addition, he noted that some studies have shown that people who participate in animal cruelty may be more likely to commit other violent crimes. | Source: Knox News - Oct 25, 2006
Update posted on Oct 29, 2006 - 4:26PM |
Stevens was sentenced Thursday to more than three years in prison for mailing videotapes of fighting pit bulls, becoming the first person sentenced under a six-year-old animal cruelty law.
Stevens was convicted in January of three counts of selling depictions of animal cruelty. He never denied selling tapes like "Pick-A-Winna," on which he described dogfighting like a sportscaster calling a televised boxing match.
Senior U.S. District Judge Alan N. Bloch sentenced Stevens to 37 months in prison but allowed him to remain free pending an appeal of his conviction.
The law, signed in 1999 by President Clinton, was spawned by so-called crush videos. Those tapes show small animals being crushed by women wearing spiked heels and are said to be favored by some foot fetishists.
Stevens' federal public defender, Michael Novara, said the law is overly broad and violates Stevens' First Amendment right to freedom of expression.
The Humane Society of the United States, which pushed for the law, said it was intended to target all those who profit from animal cruelty.
Stevens was charged in Pittsburgh because the videos were sold to Pennsylvania State Police and U.S. Department of Agriculture agents. | Source: Pilot Online - April 21, 2005
Update posted on Apr 21, 2005 - 1:00PM |
It took a jury 45 minutes yesterday to find Robert J. Stevens guilty of selling dogfighting videos under a federal law that had never been tested in a United States court.
Stevens and his wife, Julie, are pit bull fans who advertised videos in the Sporting Dog Journal, an underground publication, and then sold three tapes to undercover agents.
Stevens sold "Pick-A-Winna" and "Japan Pit Fights," both of which featured dogs mauling each other in a ring complete with handlers and spectators, and "Catch Dogs," which featured footage of pit bulls attacking farm pigs.
Stevens and his public defender, Michael Novara, argued that the videos are protected free speech under the First Amendment because they fall under an exception to the law.
Depictions of cruelty are legal if they have "serious religious, political, scientific, educational, journalistic, historical or artistic value."
Stevens said his videos had historical and educational value, but Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Kaufman said they did not.
The jury sided with Kaufman in one of the shortest deliberations in recent memory in U.S. District Court here.
Stevens faces a maximum of 15 years in prison but probably won't get that much.
Senior U.S. District Judge Alan Bloch released him pending sentencing April 21.
As conditions of his release, Bloch ordered that Stevens no longer associate with dogfighting organizations, not breed or train pit bulls, not sell any more videos and remove any pit bulls from his property.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which investigated the case with state police out of Uniontown, hailed the verdict.
In a statement, Brian Haaser, USDA agent in charge of the northeast region of the U.S., said the "landmark investigation and conviction will open the doors" to future investigations of the sale of dogfighting videos and other images of cruelty to animals. | Source: Post-Gazette - Jan 14, 2005
Update posted on Jan 14, 2005 - 1:53AM |
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