SALEM, Ore. – The Oregon Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional Thursday a state law against conducting live sex shows and a local ordinance regulating conduct of nude dancers.
Both restrictions violate the Oregon constitution’s guarantees of free speech and free expression, the court said in a pair of 5-1 decisions.
The free-expression rulings continued the court’s modern pattern of broadly interpreting state constitutional rights as forbidding virtually all regulation of obscenity.
The court’s decisions have given Oregon “one of the most protective approaches to the interests of freedom of expression” of any state, said Steven Green, a Willamette University constitutional law professor.
“It certainly keeps us on the edge so far as what is expressive activity,” he said.
The state constitution, adopted in 1859, says: “No law shall be passed restraining the free expression of opinion, or restricting the right to speak, write or print freely on any subject whatever.”
Justice Michael Gillette, who wrote the majority opinions, said it “appears to us to be beyond reasonable dispute that the protection extends to the kinds of expression that a majority of citizens in many communities would dislike – and even to physical acts, such as nude dancing or other explicit sexual conduct that have an expressive component.”
One ruling involved the owner of a now-defunct Roseburg adult business featuring live sex performances in private rooms.
Charles Ciancanelli was convicted of the crime of promoting a live sex show after undercover police paid women to engage in sexual activities while the officers watched in the “performance rooms” at the business, called Angels.
The Supreme Court tossed out that conviction, although it upheld Ciancanelli’s conviction for promoting prostitution.
That ruling “appears to expand to expand further Oregon’s already expansive free speech law,” said Kevin Neely, spokesman for Attorney General Hardy Myers.
“We don’t believe framers of the constitution intended to limit the Legislature’s authority to regulate sexual conduct in public,” Neely said. He said the decision even raises doubts “as to whether laws against indecency are constitutionally sound.”
The high court’s other ruling overturned an ordinance in the city of Nyssa that required performers to stay at least four feet away from patrons at nude dancing clubs.
Owners of Miss Sally’s Gentlemen’s Club in the small eastern Oregon town were fined $185 each for violating the ordinance.
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