Law banning filming Utah slaughterhouses ruled unconstitutional

A federal judge on Friday overturned Utah’s so-called “ag-gag” ban on filming private agribusiness and slaughterhouse operations without permission. US District Judge Robert Shelby said the measure, enacted in 2012, violated the First Amendment.

The named plaintiff, Amy Meyer, in 2013 faced up to six months in prison for filming—from the side of a public road—a sick cow being moved in a tractor at a slaughterhouse.

“I was shocked when I was the one charged with a crime instead of that animal’s abusers,” Meyer said after the ruling. “It should never be a crime to tell the story of an animal who is being abused and killed, even if it’s for food.”

Judge Shelby said Meyer was “seemingly the only person in the country to ever be charged under an ag-gag law.”

“Utah undoubtedly has an interest in addressing perceived threats to the state agricultural industry, and as history shows, it has a variety of constitutionally permissible tools at its disposal to do so. Suppressing broad swaths of protected speech without justification, however, is not one of them,” the judge wrote in response to a lawsuit brought by Meyer and animal rights groups.

The decision came the same day that a federal appeals court in Philadelphia, joining five of the other 12 federal circuit courts of appeal, ruled that the public has a First Amendment right to film the police in public.

In the Utah slaughterhouse case, meanwhile, Judge Shelby added:

In sum, it appears the consensus among courts is that the act of recording is protectable First Amendment speech. And this court agrees. Were the law otherwise, as the State contends, the State could criminalize, for example, creating music videos, or videos critical of the government, or any video at all, for that matter, with impunity.

The Utah law doesn’t make it a crime to film from public property, but Meyer was charged anyway. The charges were ultimately dismissed. Meyer, along with the Animal Legal Defense Fund and the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, sued to overturn the law. Its chief legislative sponsor, state Senator David Hinkins, had said the law was designed to target “vegetarian people” who were “trying to kill the animal industry.”

Holy cow!

So-called ag-gag laws have been around since the 1990s. They remain on the books in several states, including Montana, North Dakota, Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, and North Carolina. The measures were introduced in the wake of published videos that led to bankruptcies of packing plants, a tightening of farming practices, and to the boycotts of McDonald’s, Target, Sam’s Club, and other retailers.

In Idaho, lawmakers there approved an ag-gag measure in 2014, two years after the release of a video showing dairy workers beating, stomping, and dragging cows. A year later, a federal judge declared that law an unconstitutional restriction of First Amendment speech. That ruling is on appeal.