Court Rules Video Law ‘Too Vague’

A landmark Missouri law restricting the sale or rental of violent videotapes to minors has been ruled unconstitutional because it is too vague.

U.S. District Judge D. Brook Bartlett said that the 1989 law, described as the first in the nation to restrict access to videos on the basis of violence, did not adequately define the tapes it would regulate.

“How about ‘Bambi?’ How about ‘Road Runner?’ ” Bartlett asked at a hearing this week before issuing the ruling. “There’s an awful lot of people and animals squashed in those cartoons.”

Bartlett said the law’s definition of violence did not “express with clarity what the (Missouri) General Assembly was attempting to regulate.”

“A vague law is a convenient tool for discriminatory law enforcement and for arbitrary suppression of First Amendment liberties,” Bartlett said.

He also held that unlike obscenity, violent speech has not been determined to be outside the First Amendment, so “far greater precision must be used” in such laws.

Gov. John Ashcroft signed the law in June 1989, but Bartlett issued a temporary restraining order after a group of video and movie associations challenged it.

The statute called for placing videos in a separate part of a store if the violence in them would appeal “to morbid interest,” be “patently offensive” or lacking “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value for persons under the age of 17.”

Such videos could not be sold or rented to people 16 or younger, and any store operator who did so would have been subject to civil penalties.

The state attorney general’s office argued that since the law was intended to protect juveniles, the state could adopt tougher controls than it could on materials for adults.

Mary Jenkins, a spokeswoman for the state attorney general’s office, said lawyers had not decided whether to appeal the ruling.