## Facts

- Robert Quentin and John Garcia distributed a brochure in Nassau County that expressed a rebellious political message about American society.
- The brochure described conduct such as burning draft cards and rejecting conventional credentials and social norms.
- After setting out this philosophy, the brochure included instructions for making a fire bomb.
- The brochure also included chemical information and a formula for making DET and DMT, psychedelic substances that were illegal to possess under New York law at the time.
- The People charged defendants based on the contents and distribution of the brochure, including a count of criminal solicitation in the third degree on the theory that the brochure sought to cause readers to possess DET and DMT.
- Defendants moved to dismiss, arguing that the solicitation theory improperly treated a general publication of ideas and information as a solicitation offense and that the charged counts were legally insufficient.

## Issues

1. Whether distributing a brochure that includes a formula for making illegal drugs, offered to the public at large, constitutes criminal solicitation in the third degree.
2. Whether the general distribution of the brochure, without allegations of direct conduct toward a particular child, supports a charge of endangering the welfare of a child.
3. Whether the brochure’s sexually explicit material, considered in context, meets New York’s obscenity standard so as to support an obscenity charge.

## Decision

- The court granted the motion to dismiss the solicitation count, holding that the brochure’s general dissemination and generalized exhortatory content did not constitute solicitation of a specific criminal act by a particular person.
- The court dismissed the child-welfare endangerment count because the allegations did not show the type of knowing, child-directed conduct contemplated by the statute.
- The court dismissed the obscenity count, concluding that the material, evaluated in context and as a whole under the governing obscenity test, did not fall within the narrow category of unprotected obscene material.

## Legal Principles

- Criminal solicitation requires an intentional effort to induce another person to commit a specific crime; a broadly circulated publication aimed at an indeterminate audience is ordinarily not enough without a direct request or inducement.
- Speech and printed material remain protected even when they discuss unlawful conduct or supply information that could be misused; criminal liability generally requires more than abstract advocacy or the provision of information.
- Obscenity is assessed under a strict definition and with attention to the work as a whole; material with nontrivial political, literary, or scientific content is less likely to qualify as obscene under constitutional limits applicable at the time.
- Endangering the welfare of a child requires knowing conduct likely to be injurious to a child; generalized distribution of literature, without allegations of focused conduct toward a child or children, is insufficient.

## Conclusion

People v. Quentin held that the State could not treat a generally distributed brochure—mixing radical political statements with instructions and formulas for dangerous or unlawful activity—as criminal solicitation or child endangerment absent allegations of a direct, person-specific inducement or child-directed conduct, and it also rejected the obscenity charge when the publication was evaluated in context under the governing obscenity standard.


People v. Quentin, 58 Misc. 2d 601, 296 N.Y.S.2d 443 (1968)