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State attorney: Station's airing of suicide legal
By BILL VARIAN, Times Staff Writer TAMPA -- The Hillsborough state attorney said Friday that producers of the county's public access television station broke no laws by airing footage of the 1987 suicide of a Pennsylvania state official. Hillsborough Commissioner Ronda Storms had asked for the opinion in June as part of her continuing campaign against funding for the station. In particular, she was objecting to a May 10 broadcast of the program Saheeb's Dream. During the program, producer Saheeb Yusuf Al-Mahdi played a clip that included then-Pennsylvania Treasurer R. Budd Dwyer committing suicide by shooting himself in the head. Dwyer had been convicted of bribery. Video of his shooting has been on the Internet for years. On the show, Al-Mahdi played a character called "Billy Willie," who can be heard urging Dwyer to "do it, do it, do it," before he pulls the trigger. Storms never said what crime she thought might have been committed. So State Attorney Mark Ober, in a written opinion, said his office had reviewed Florida Statutes and case law that might bear some relevance. He said the show couldn't be considered obscene because obscenity requires sexual conduct. He also said it couldn't be considered a breach of peace or disorderly conduct, because the courts have interpreted such laws narrowly in banning actions that by their utterance would "incite a breach of peace." (Think shouting "fire" in a movie theater.) Ober held up, among other cases, a ruling in Waller vs. Osborne, the 1991 federal case in which the parents of a minor unsuccessfully sued heavy metal rocker Ozzy Osbourne, claiming that his song Suicide Solution had prompted their child to commit suicide. In that case, the court found that the plaintiffs couldn't prove that the song incited "imminent lawless activity." Storms said Friday that she had not seen the opinion and could not comment.
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From the Times Sandra Thompson Bill Varian and David Karp |
