The First Amendment, as applied through the Fourteenth, protected a movie theater manager from being prosecuted for possessing and showing a film that was not obscene.
Nico Jacobellis, manager of the Heights Art Theatre in the
Coventry Village neighborhood of
Cleveland Heights, Ohio, was charged with two counts of possessing and exhibiting an obscene film in [378 U.S. 184, 186] violation of Ohio Revised Code (1963 Supp.), convicted and ordered by a judge of the
Cuyahoga CountyCourt of Common Pleas to pay fines of $500 on the first count and $2,000 on the second (equivalent to $26,000 in 2023),[2] or if the fines were not paid, to be incarcerated at the
workhouse, for exhibiting the film.[3] Jacobellis' conviction was upheld by the
Ohio Court of Appeals[4] and the
Supreme Court of Ohio.[5]
Supreme Court
The Supreme Court of the United States reversed the conviction by ruling that the film was not obscene and so was constitutionally protected. However, the Court could not agree as to a rationale, yielding four different opinions from the majority. No opinion, including the two dissenting ones, had the support of more than two justices. The decision was announced by
William J. Brennan, but his opinion was joined only by Justice
Arthur Goldberg.
Justice
Hugo Black, joined by Justice
William O. Douglas, reiterated his well-known view that the First Amendment does not permit censorship of any kind.[6] Chief Justice
Earl Warren, in dissent, decried the confused state of the Court's obscenity jurisprudence and argued that Ohio's action was consistent with the Court's decision in Roth v. United States and furthered important state interests.[7] Justice
John Marshall Harlan II also dissented; he believed that states should have "wide, but not federally unrestricted" power to ban obscene films.[8]
The most famous opinion from Jacobellis, however, was Justice
Potter Stewart's concurrence, stating that the Constitution protected all obscenity except "
hard-core pornography". He wrote, "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But
I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."[9]
Subsequent developments
The Court's obscenity jurisprudence would remain fragmented until 1973's Miller v. California.[10]