A 24-year-old Houston, Texas woman pleaded guilty Tuesday to producing and distributing online so-called crush videos where puppies, chickens and kittens were mutilated and stomped on for the purpose of sexually arousing the audience.

The indictment of Ashley Nicole Richards was the nation's first following a Supreme Court decision in 2010 that found a federal statute outlawing animal cruelty videos was overbroad and a breach of the First Amendment because it could lead to the criminalization of hunting videos, for example. Congress updated the Animal Crush Video Prohibition Act in 2010 and apparently cured the constitutional deficiencies.

According to the First Amendment Center:

The successor law focuses more narrowly on crush videos, which appeal to a certain fetish by displaying the torture and killing of small animals, often by women using stiletto heels. The new law ties the crime to animal cruelty and to obscenity, which the Court has long placed outside the protection of the First Amendment. The law specifically exempts depictions of "customary and normal veterinary or agricultural husbandry practices...the slaughter of animals for food or … hunting, trapping, or fishing."

In essence, it is illegal to depict—"via photograph, motion-picture film, video, digital recording or electronic image—actual conduct in which one or more living non-human mammals, birds, reptiles or amphibians is intentionally crushed, burned, drowned, suffocated, impaled or otherwise subjected to serious bodily injury, and is obscene," the government said.

The government said People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals alerted authorities to the films with titles such as "puppy1" "whitechick1" and "blackluvsample."

According to the government:

In the “puppy2” video, which is more than 13 minutes in length, Richards is seen torturing and killing a blue Pit Bull-mix puppy in a kitchen. The defenseless dog’s mouth is closed with duct tape and he struggles as Richards strikes the dog numerous times with a meat cleaver. In the video, Richards chops off one of the puppy’s paws, then hacks at his head and neck. Richards is later seen severing the dog’s head and urinating on its body. In another video, described in court today, Richards steps on a cat’s eye with heel of her shoe. Previous court records also indicated that during the videos, Richards is often scantily clad and wearing a Mardi Gras-type mask. As she tortured the animals, she engaged in sexually charged dialogue meant to arouse the viewer.

A federal judge had originally dismissed the prosecution, saying the footage was constitutionally protected. A federal appeals court reversed, and the US Supreme Court declined to revisit the issue.

Richards is scheduled to be sentenced on December 10. She faces a maximum 7 years in prison for each of the five counts to which she pleaded guilty.

Listing image by Houston Police Department