A federal judge has snuffed out a government mandate requiring tobacco companies to place graphic images about the dangers of smoking on cigarette packs.

Washington, D.C., Judge Richard Leon said in Wednesday’s ruling those requirements were a violation of free speech.

“The graphic images here were neither designed to protect the consumer from confusion or deception, nor to increase consumer awareness of smoking risks,” Leon wrote. “Rather they were crafted to evoke a strong emotional response calculated to provoke the viewer to quit or never start smoking.”

PHOTOS: INCREDIBLY GRAPHIC TOBACCO WARNING LABELS

Leon also lit into Congress for failing to “consider the First Amendment implications of this legislation.”

“It did not concern itself with how the regulations could be narrowly tailored to avoid unintentionally compelling commercial speech,” the judge wrote.

The images that made Big Tobacco gasp included a man holding a cigarette as smoke billows from a tracheotomy hole in his throat, a child breathing in second-hand smoke, blackened lungs and a corpse with an autopsy scar on its chest.

Leon’s ruling came just as the Bloomberg administration, which has taken a hard line against smoking in public places, was unrolling a new anti-smoking drive which features more jarring images of bodies ravaged by cancer.

The “Quitting is much less painful” campaign runs through March 16.

Leon’s ruling was greeted with silence by the federal Food and Drug Administration and the Justice Department, which defended the law in court.