Hewitt v. Maryland State Board of Censors

254 A.2d 203, 254 Md. 179, 1969 Md. LEXIS 860
CourtCourt of Appeals of Maryland
DecidedJune 6, 1969
Docket[No. 278, September Term, 1968.]
StatusPublished
Cited by12 cases

This text of 254 A.2d 203 (Hewitt v. Maryland State Board of Censors) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals of Maryland primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Hewitt v. Maryland State Board of Censors, 254 A.2d 203, 254 Md. 179, 1969 Md. LEXIS 860 (Md. 1969).

Opinion

Barnes, J.,

delivered the opinion of the Court.

This appeal is from an order of the Circuit Court of *181 Baltimore City (O’Donnell, J.), passed August 2, 1968, in which the film “Odd Tastes” was disapproved for licensing as being in violation of the provisions of Code (1957), Art. 66A, § 6 (b) as found by the appellee, Maryland State Board of Censors (the Board). The Board, finding the film to be obscene, petitioned the Circuit Court for a determination of its obscenity in accordance with the applicable provisions of the Maryland law. The appellant, William E. Hewitt, trading as Baltimore Film Society, submitted the film to the Board for approval and licensing, was a party to the proceedings before the Board and the Circuit Court and took a timely appeal to this Court from the order of August 2, 1968. We have viewed the film as required by Art. 66A, § 19 (a).

At the trial in the lower court, the Board called three expert witnesses: Dr. Robert M. Vidaver, on the issues of appeal to prurient interest and contravention of contemporary community standards; Professor William R. Mueller of Goucher College and Reuben Kramer, a prominent sculptor of national reputation, the testimony of the two last mentioned witnesses being limited to the issue of redeeming social value. The appellant, Hewitt, called two witnesses in the lower court: Dr. Sol Gordon, a clinical psychologist, and Albert D. Gerber, a Philadelphia attorney and legal advisor to makers of “sexploitation” films. We will now consider the test to be applied, the qualifications and testimony of these witnesses.

There were three issues of mixed law and fact involved before the Board and the lower court arising from our previous decisions applying the constitutional requirements imposed by decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States in regard to freedom of speech. In Dunn v. Maryland State Board of Censors, 240 Md. 249, 255, 213 A. 2d 751, 754 (1965), Judge (now Chief Judge) Hammond, for the Court, aptly stated:

“We think it plain that save in the rare case where there could be no doubt that the film is obscene the Board will not meet the burden of *182 persuasion imposed on it by the Constitution and the statute without offering testimony that the picture is obscene in that (a) the average person, applying community standards, would find that its dominant theme, taken as a whole, appeals to prurient interest, (b) that the film goes substantially beyond customary limits of candor in description or representation of sex or other matters dealt with, and (c) that it is subject to proscription because it is utterly without redeeming social importance considered in light of the fact that * * sex and obscenity are not synonymous’, Roth, 354 U. S. 476, 487, 1 L. Ed. 2d 1498, 1508, and the fact that material dealing with sex in a manner that advocates ideas or has literary, scientific or artistic value or any other form of social importance may not be branded as obscenity.”

Our definition of obscenity — the Roth-Alberts test — was restated with somewhat different emphasis perhaps, by the Supreme Court in A Book Named “John Clelands' Memoirs of A Woman of Pleasure” v. Attorney General, 383 U. S. 413, 418, 86 S. Ct. 975, 977, 16 L.Ed.2d 1, 5-6 (1966), hereinafter referred to as Memoirs, in which Mr. Justice Brennan, for the Supreme Court, stated:

“We defined obscenity in Roth in the following terms: ‘[W]hether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient interest.’ 354 U.S. at 489. Under this definition, as elaborated in subsequent cases, three elements must coalesce: it must be established that (a) the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to a prurient interest in sex; (b) the material is patently offensive because it affronts contemporary community standards relating to the description or representation of sexual matters; *183 and (c) the material is utterly without redeeming social value.”

We recognized and applied this latest statement of the applicable rule in Sanza v. Maryland State Board of Censors, 245 Md. 319, 326-27, 226 A. 2d 317, 320-21 (1967), in which we sustained the Circuit Court and the Board in their finding that certain films, shown in an arcade in “the Block” in Baltimore, were obscene. Dr. Vidaver (because of a misprint, referred to as Dr. Ridaver in Sanza) testified before the Circuit Court as an expert in Sanza and his testimony was relied upon by the Chancellor in that case and by us on appeal.

The appellant conceded at the argument of the case before us that there was sufficient evidence before the Chancellor from Dr. Vidaver’s testimony from which he could find that the dominant theme of the film “Odd Tastes” taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest. He earnestly argued in both his brief and at the oral argument that Dr. Vidaver’s testimony was not sufficient to sustain the Board’s burden of proof to establish that the film was patently offensive because it affronted contemporary community standards relating to the description or representation of sexual matters. At the threshold of the appellant’s argument on this issue is the contention that Dr. Vidaver is not qualified as an expert witness to express an opinion having any probative value on the issue. We do not agree with this contention.

Dr. Vidaver’s qualifications as an expert witness are impressive and, as we have already indicated, both the Chancellor and this Court relied upon his expert testimony on this issue — as well as other issues — in Sanza. In Sanza, Judge Oppenheimer, for the Court, summarized Dr. Vidaver’s qualifications as follows:

“Dr. Robert M. Vidaver is Director of Psychiatric Education for the State of Maryland, Department of Mental Hygiene. Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, he lived in the midwest during the early part of his life. He was graduated from *184 Columbia University and studied medicine at ■ the City University of New York, interned at the University of Maryland and the University Hospital, had three years’ post-graduate training at the Yale Institute and has been on the faculties of the Johns Hopkins Hospital and the University of Maryland. He was Chief of the Psychiatric Section of Medical Service, United States Army.” (245 Md. at 328, 226 A. 2d at 321)

In addition to these qualifications, Dr. Vidaver testified in the lower court in the present case in reply to a question in regard to his training in audio-visual techniques for use in treating mental-health problems:

“Well, what we were trying to do was set up a closed-circuit video-tape television system at the University of Maryland Psychiatric Institute as a means of training medical students in a variety of professional skills and psychiatric diagnosis.

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Related

Curtis v. State
395 A.2d 464 (Court of Appeals of Maryland, 1979)
Mangum v. Maryland State Board of Censors
328 A.2d 283 (Court of Appeals of Maryland, 1974)
Ebert v. Maryland State Board of Censors
313 A.2d 536 (Court of Special Appeals of Maryland, 1973)
Village Books, Inc. v. State's Attorney
282 A.2d 126 (Court of Appeals of Maryland, 1973)
In Re Seven Magazines
268 A.2d 707 (Supreme Court of Rhode Island, 1970)
Hewitt v. Maryland State Board of Censors
260 A.2d 319 (Court of Appeals of Maryland, 1970)
Wagonheim v. Maryland State Board of Censors
258 A.2d 240 (Court of Appeals of Maryland, 1969)
Lancaster v. State
256 A.2d 716 (Court of Special Appeals of Maryland, 1969)

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Bluebook (online)
254 A.2d 203, 254 Md. 179, 1969 Md. LEXIS 860, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/hewitt-v-maryland-state-board-of-censors-md-1969.