First Amendment End Run

摘要

Timothy Bruce Huffman was convicted of exposing himself on TV In the first case of its kind, the American Civil Liberties Union has taken over his appeal. A three-minute segment of Huffman's Friday-night half-hour show on GRTV the public access channel in Grand Rapids, Mich., featured a penis with a face painted on it delivering bar jokes. Instead of invoking TV-obscenity prohibitions, Kent County prosecutors concluded that the segment violated Michigan's indecent-exposure law. A trial court and circuit court agreed, finding that the cable-access channel was a "public place" and that exposure was conduct, not speech, and thus not protected by the First Amendment. Now it's up to the Michigan State Court of Appeals to weigh in.