The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the federal ban on distribution of child pornography, saying it meets constitutional free-speech stan-dards.
Ruling 7-2 in a California case, the court said it interpreted the law to require proof that defendants knew the material involved a sexual performance by someone under age 18."The age of the performers is the crucial element separating legal innocence from wrongful conduct," Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote for the court.
The court acknowledged it was rejecting the "most grammatical reading" of the law but said that reading would raise serious doubts about the statute's con-sti-tu-tion-ality.
"It is therefore incumbent upon us to read the statute to eliminate those doubts so long as such a reading is not plainly contrary to the intent of Congress," Rehnquist wrote.
Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in dissent that the decision "saves a single conviction by putting in place a relatively toothless child-pornography law that Congress did not enact."
The decision granted the Clinton administration's bid to reinstate a Los Angeles porn shop owner's con-viction for distributing sexually explicit videotapes made by Traci Lords when she was 15.
Lords was a well-known porn star when it was discovered in 1986 that she was underage when she made many of her sex films.
Rubin Gottesman, owner of X-Citement Video, was convicted of selling over 100 Lords tapes to an undercover policeman in 1986. He was sentenced to a year in prison and three years' probation, while his business was fined $100,000.
A federal appeals court threw out Gottesman's conviction, saying the federal anti-child-porn law did not require prosecutors to prove that he knew Lords was underage when she made the films.
The Constitution's free-speech protection requires such knowledge, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said.
The law makes it a crime to "knowingly" transport or ship child pornography. The 9th Circuit court said the word "knowingly" refers to transporting or shipping but does not require knowledge that the material involved a sexual depiction of a minor.
Obscenity is not constitutionally protected speech. In 1982, the Supreme Court ruled that government also can ban the sale and distribution of child pornography.