Crush Videos

When I want to get off, I really enjoy watching a slut in heels step all over a squealing kitty. Unfortunately, this practice is illegal.
Thankfully, it's now going to court for violation of first amendment rights.

Ten years ago, Congress banned these fetish films.
Crush videos are, essentially, videos in which small animals are crushed.

“Much of the material featured women inflicting the torture with their bare feet or while wearing high-heeled shoes,” the report said. “In some video depictions, the woman’s voice can be heard talking to the animals in a kind of dominatrix patter. The cries and squeals of the animals, obviously in great pain, can also be heard in the videos.”

In the case of Robert J. Stevens, a Virginia man sentenced to 37 months in prison under the law for selling videos of dogfights.
In July, by a vote of 10 to 3, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, reversed Mr. Stevens’s conviction and struck down the law, saying it violated the constitutional right to free speech.

Last month, the United States solicitor general asked the Supreme Court to hear the case. “Depictions of the intentional infliction of suffering on vulnerable creatures,” the brief said, “play no essential role in the expression of ideas.” The First Amendment, the brief went on, is therefore irrelevant to the case.

Unlike private litigants, who face long odds in persuading the court to hear their cases, the solicitor general’s success rate is between 50 percent and 70 percent. Perhaps even more important, the case involves a federal statute that has been held unconstitutional.

Under this law, it may well be a crime for an American to sell a video of a bullfight that took place in Spain, where bullfighting is legal, or of hunting or fishing out of season.

“It is hard to imagine,” Mr. Stevens’s lawyers told the appeals court, “how the punishment of depictions of conduct which occurred a long time ago, at a time when it was not even illegal, or in a country where it is not illegal, can prevent animal cruelty here and now, at a time and a place where it is illegal.”

When President Bill Clinton signed the bill into law, he issued a statement instructing the Justice Department to limit prosecutions to “wanton cruelty to animals designed to appeal to a prurient interest in sex.”

Professor Volokh, who said he believed the law was unconstitutional, offered a prediction about its fate in the Supreme Court. “I think they’re going to strike it down,” he said. “It’s going to be at least 6-3, perhaps even unanimous.”

Step on, brother, step on.