The Animal Crush Video Prohibition Act of 2010 is the U.S. statute Congress wrote after the Supreme Court tore up the first federal attempt to ban crush-fetish films. The citation is Pub. L. 111-294, 124 Stat. 3177, enacted 9 December 2010. The bill was H.R. 5566, introduced by Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-CA). What it actually rewrote was 18 U.S.C. § 48. For a fetish-law reader the plot is narrow: a crush fetish built on footage of small animals being trampled, a 1999 ban that swept too wide, an 8–1 First Amendment loss, and a second statute that tried to describe the same tapes more tightly. The Fifth Circuit later upheld the 2010 act in USA v. Richards.
What the 1999 law tried to ban
The 2010 act revised the version of 18 U.S.C. § 48 that had taken effect on 9 December 1999. That earlier text arrived as Pub. L. 106-152. It aimed at the publication, sale, and ownership of so-called crush videos: films in which a person, or another animal, crushes or tramples a smaller animal to death. The legal problem was that the 1999 wording did not stay inside that market. It read like a ban on depictions of animal cruelty in general, which is a much larger pile of images than a high-heel tape sold to a crush buyer.
Stevens, then Gallegly’s rewrite
In 2010 the Supreme Court held that the 1999 statute was too vague and too broad — an unconstitutional abridgment of First Amendment speech — in United States v. Stevens. The vote was 8–1. Congress answered the same year with Gallegly’s bill instead of abandoning the subject. The 2010 act kept the target (crush videos made to satisfy that fetish) and tried to write a description a court could live with. In USA v. Richards, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals said the rewrite stood. The sequence, stripped of sermon, is three dates and three captions: a 1999 possession-and-sale ban, a 2010 Supreme Court strike, and a 2010 replacement that a Fifth Circuit panel then let stand.
