Miller v. California

In case anyone needs a refresher, the following is a summary of the Supreme Court's current obscenity test, also known as the Miller test. Miller v. California was decided on June 21, 2972

In Miller v. California, the defendant was convicted of mailing unsolicited sexually explicit material in violation of a California statute because he knowingly distributing a obscene matter. The Court began the opinion by articulating the legitimate interest held by states in prohibiting dissemination or exhibition of obscene material "when the mode of dissemination carries with it a significant danger of offending the sensibilities of unwilling recipients or of exposure to juveniles." Next, the court reviewed the two landmark cases in the history of its obscenity decisions: Roth v. United States and Memoirs v. Massachusetts .

The Court explained, "While Roth presumed 'obscenity' to be 'utterly without redeeming social importance,' Memoirs required that to prove obscenity it must be affirmatively established that the material is 'utterly without redeeming social value.' The Court also discussed the importance of 1st Amendment protections of speech and how difficult it was to draw any bright line rule.

Ultimately, the Court outlined the now infamous Miller Test. "The basic guidelines for the trier of fact must be: (a) whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards would find that the work, taken as a while, appeals to the prurient interest (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law, and (c) whether the work, taken as a while, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value."

Under the Miller holding, "no one will be subject to prosecution for the sale or exposure of obscene materials unless these materials depict or describe patently offensive hard core sexual conduct specifically defined by the regulating state law." Additionally, the Court explained that the community standard by which to judge whether something appeals to the prurient interest is not a national standard, but rather a local standard according to the "average" person in that community.