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05/13/2002 - Updated 03:28 PM ET



Justices rule to shield kids from online porn

By Joan Biskupic, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON ? The Supreme Court on Monday gave new life to the government's 
effort to make it a crime to put sexually explicit pictures on the Internet 
where they can be seen by children. But the justices made clear that there are 
constitutional hurdles that could prevent the law from being enforced.

Throwing out a lower court decision that struck down the 1998 Child Online 
Protection Act, the justices returned the case to lower courts for hearings on 
whether the act violates adult free speech rights.

That is unlikely to be an easy task. The justices mustered no majority for a 
single legal rationale, and offered competing views of how the First Amendment 
applies to the unique medium of the Internet. The five separate opinions in the 
case showed the difficulty of crafting principles for regulating the Web.

By an 8-1 vote, the justices voided a lower court ruling that had said the 1998 
law was unconstitutional simply because it was linked to "community standards" 
for what may be prurient.

For nearly three decades, courts have used a "contemporary community standards" 
test to determine whether sexually explicit materials can be restricted locally.

But the U.S. Court of Appeals in Philadelphia ruled that such an approach 
cannot work on the Internet, because messages are so easily forwarded. The 
lower court said that would force materials to be subject to the standards of 
the most conservative areas.

The justices splintered Monday over whether a test tied to local tastes could 
ever be used. Two key justices, Sandra Day O'Connor and Stephen Breyer, said a 
national standard for the Internet should prevail.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the court, but only for the narrow view that 
the law's use of community standards to identify "material that is harmful to 
minors" does not, by itself, make the statute unconstitutional. Justice John 
Paul Stevens alone dissented. Justices Anthony Kennedy, David Souter and Ruth 
Bader Ginsburg suggested that they ultimately might find the law 
unconstitutional






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