High Court to Hear Case on Violent Video Games
Supreme Case Agreed to Hear Case on Violent Video Games
Taking up a new First Amendment test of disturbing images, the Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear California’s appeal of a decision that struck down a state law prohibiting the sale or rental of violent video games to minors.
The justices’ decision to accept the case, which will be heard in the term that begins next fall, comes a week after the justices threw out a federal law that swept too broadly in banning depictions of animal cruelty. The court by an 8-1 vote rejected arguments by the federal government that it could carve out a new exception to the First Amendment — as exists for obscenity — for images of animal cruelty, such as dogfighting.
In the new dispute, Schwarzenegger v. Video Software Dealers Association, California officials urge the justices to create an exemption for a class of violent videos that appeals “to the deviant or morbid interest and has no socially redeeming value for minors.”
Led by Attorney General Jerry Brown, state officials say studies point to “growing evidence that these games harm minors.”
Paul Smith, a lawyer who represents associations of companies that create and sell videos, disputed the danger of the games and termed them “a modern form of artistic expression. Like motion pictures and television programs, video games tell stories and entertain audiences.”
The 2005 law, challenged by the Video Software Dealers Association and Entertainment Software Association, bars the sale or rental of “violent” video games to minors and calls for fines of up to $1,000.
The law defines a violent game as one that depicts “killing, maiming, dismembering or sexually assaulting an image of a human being” in a way that appeals to a deviant interest of minors and lacks “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.”
As an example of a game the law might cover, California officials cited one in which “girls attacked with a shovel will beg for mercy; the player can be merciless and decapitate them.”
A federal appeals court ruled last year that the California law was too broadly written and that state lawyers had failed to justify any First Amendment exception for video games. The appeals court questioned the connection to psychological harm to youths and said, “Even if the state had a compelling interest in preventing psychological or neurological harm allegedly caused … by violent video games, the law was not narrowly tailored to further that interest.”
In its appeal, California argues that “excessively violent material is no more worthy of First Amendment protection than sexual material” when children are involved. The state’s argument relies largely on a 1968 case, Ginsberg v. New York, that upheld restrictions on the sale of sexual material to minors.
Smith had countered that the obscenity exception to the First Amendment has long been confined to sexually explicit, not violent, materials. Regarding video games generally, Smith said, “Like great literature, games often involve themes such as good vs. evil, triumph over adversity, struggle against corrupt powers and quest for adventure.
David Hudson, a lawyer at the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, said the case “gives the court a pristine opportunity to explain whether the ‘harmful to minors’ standard applies outside of sex and into violence.”
