Amy Kiste Nyberg
Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code
(1998)
[38] The legal case of most concern to those drafting state and federal legislation against comic books was a case that dealt, not with a comic book, but an adult crime magazine, Headquarters Detective, True Cases from the Police Blotter. Two thousand copies of the magazine were seized in New York under a section of the New York Penal Code that made it illegal to publish, distribute, or sell any book, pamphlet, magazine, or newspaper made up primarily of criminal news, police reports, or accounts of criminal deeds, or pictures, or stories of deeds of bloodshed, lust, or crime. The
[39]
book dealer was convicted, but after more than seven years of litigation, lower court decisions were reversed by the United States Supreme Court on March 29, I948, on the grounds that the law was unconstitutional. Similar statutes in eighteen states were overturned by the decision in Winters v. New York.
The Supreme Court found the laws prohibiting depiction of crime and violence in the media unconstitutional as written, since they violated both the First and Fourteenth amendments. Although obscenity and pornography were not protected under the First Amendment, the Court ruled that crime magazines, while containing little of value to society, were as much entitled to free speech protection as the best of literature. The Court also noted that while words such as obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, indecent, or disgusting were "well understood through long use in criminal law," the provisions against crime and bloodshed were unconstitutionally vague because the clause had no "technical or common law meaning." Without a precise definition, it was impossible for an individual to know when he or she was in violation of the law. Therefore, the New York law was also in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing due process.
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The Supreme Court's decision in 1948 set guidelines for media content that are still at issue today. Laws regulating obscenity and pornography are on the books in almost every city and state, but the regulation of violent content in the media, while it spurs periodic public outcry and legislative investigation, ultimately remains the responsibility of the media industries and their self-regulatory bodies.
