There's a sadistic practice in this country
that some people get pleasure out of.
It's watching small animals crushed, tortured to death,
often by women, and they get a kind of erotic rush from it.
They do so through the mechanism of videos.
Congress decided to pass a statute
that would forbid the selling
and the producing of such videos,
drying up the market
so that the underlying acts wouldn't happen again.
Although the statute passed by Congress
was designed to prevent and punish crush videos,
in actuality, the first person convicted
was not a producer of crush videos
but of another kind of animal cruelty video, dogfighting.
Robert J. Stevens made a lot of money
out of selling such dogfighting videos.
After his conviction,
he made a constitutional argument that the statute
under which he was convicted was unconstitutional.
It was contrary to the First Amendment.
And the case came up before the Supreme Court.
So this brings us to this question of overbreadth.
Normally, the Court will not hear a case
unless the complainant has standing.
Standing requires that the person complaining
actually can show a specific harm
that was inflicted by the application of the law,
and that the Court is capable of redressing that harm.
In First Amendment jurisprudence,
the Court has created an exception
to the requirements of standing.
The exception is that if some part of the statute,
applied to third parties not before the Court,
would be unconstitutional,
then the Court will strike down the entire statute.
Stevens' argument was, "First of all, I didn't do it."
(laughs) The Court didn't deal with that.
He said, "There's a problem in this statute
which I think is insoluble.
There are many instances where animals are wounded or killed
and they are not tortured, and it is not against state law.
And there are many videos
of animals being wounded or killed.
Hunting videos, for example.
This statute may be overbroad."
The first argument the government made
in seeking to protect this statute
was that it didn't apply to speech at all,
didn't apply to expression at all.
Videos are expression.
Well, the government said,
"No, this was just conduct, not speech.
And then said, "Well, we should interpret the words
'wounding' and 'killing' in the context
of the whole statute, which is about torture."
In the end, Robert J. Stevens won,
not because what he did was protected under the law,
but because the statute that was applied to him
was overbroad and unconstitutional.
The vote was 8-1,
Justice Samuel Alito the only dissenter.
The Supreme Court found that the statute was overbroad
because part of the statute
would apply to the wounding or killing of animals,
which is not regarded in many state laws
as being animal cruelty at all.
The day the case came down,
the sponsor of the original legislation
put in a new bill specifically targeting only crush videos.
It was specific and fit this kind of expression
under a category of speech, obscenity,
which is not protected by the First Amendment.
So at bottom, this case affirms the separation of powers.
It respects what Congress wrote.
Even if Congress writes it mistakenly,
the Supreme Court will determine
only if a statute is applied
or being overbroad in a constitutional way.
It will not take over Congress' job in rewriting a statute,
but it will allow Congress
to correct the constitutional mistakes
so that each branch of government fulfills its proper role.