A while back, somewhere in these blasted archives, I wrote about the US vs Stevens case in the Supreme Court. For those who don’t recall or haven’t been paying attention, the case revolved around the arrest of Robert Stevens for the possession and sale of videos depicting animal cruelty.
Stevens was convicted and sentenced to prison on charges that his books and videos documenting the history and behavior of the Pit Bull violated a federal law which prohibited the commercial depiction of “animal cruelty”. The law was created in 1999 to stop the spread of “crush videos”, in which women in high heels crush small animals (this was an allegedly, widespread sexual fetish). I doubt many of us would argue that this kind of thing is pretty repulsive, and most would agree that crushing mice or gerbils under a high-heeled foot certainly meets the definition of animal cruelty. However, no crush video makers or distributors ever were arrested or convicted under this law. What’s more, the way the law is worded, it can be broadly applied to almost any depiction of the injury or killing of any animal… potentially including everything from hunting videos to documentaries.
Which brings us to Mr. Stevens’s case…
Robert Stevens is an expert on the Pit Bull, and has been writing and making videos about the breed for many years. A good bit of his work included a focus on dog fighting, which is an unquestionably integral part of the Pit Bull’s history and breeding.
While he never took an active stance in support of dog fighting (he vocally opposed it), the inclusion of the practice in his work put him on the wrong side of animal rights activists who mounted a campaign against him. With the passage of the 1999 law, they finally had what they needed to bring the pressure. Using the dog fights in one his videos as evidence, the activists brought the federal law down on Mr. Stevens. They arrived in a midnight raid that (by his own description) was better suited to taking out a terrorist cell than to effecting the arrest of one old man.
I’ve written most of this before, particularly over on the Native Hunt blog. The point is, that after almost seven years of debate and discussion, the case finally made its way before the Supreme Court. Stevens, and many key figures in the outdoor media industry (as well as several in the “mainstream media”) fought the conviction and the law on the grounds that it was too broad, and posed potential danger to any media that included depictions of harming animals… including hunting magazines, videos, and books.
The final decision came through today, and it was a clear victory for Mr. Stevens and the free press. You can read about it here, in the Washington Post.
Wonderful to see common sense winning out once in a while! Thanks for writing about it Phil.