Given this legal principle, how could pornography be criminal, in the way that prostitution is? California, as long as a work, taken as a whole, has "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value," the First Amendment protects its distribution. Most distributors of pornography would express shock at the prospect of being prosecuted for promoting prostitution. To appreciate the unfairness, let us examine some of the arguments for this distinction.
Stated differently, the District Attorney's office has perhaps correctly divined the legislative intent behind the statute at issue, but there might nonetheless be something fundamentally unfair about exempting distributors of nonobscene pornography from the vice laws. Still, as Justice Goodman points out, traditional interpretations of the word "prostitute" narrow the literal definition to exempt pornography.īut that leads to another question: Does the pornography exemption make sense? New York Penal Law defines a prostitute as a person "who engages or agrees or offers to engage in sexual conduct with another person in return for a fee." A pornographic actor does just that: Like a more typical prostitute, he or she engages in sex in return for a fee. Justice Goodman may be correct about the statute in question, although the statutory language does not help his position. In keeping with this distinction, notes Justice Goodman, "the pornographic motion picture industry has flourished without prosecution since its infancy." In other words, prostitution is generally understood as the bilateral trading of sex for money, while pornography involves the customer of an adult film paying money to watch other people have sex with each other, while receiving no sexual favors himself in return. We intuit that pornography, by contrast, involves a customer paying an actor for providing sexual services to another actor. Most of us typically think of prostitution as involving a customer who pays a prostitute for providing sexual services. Though the Equal Protection argument may be weak as a matter of statutory interpretation, the distinction between prostitution and pornography is not nearly as clear as Justice Goodman suggests. "Prostitution," said Justice Goodman, "is and has always been intuitively defined as a bilateral exchange between a prostitute and a client." Therefore, the judge explained, the district attorney's office has not ignored one form of prostitution and pursued another, within the meaning of the law. Goodman recently issued a ruling rejecting Paulino's claim, on the ground that pornography does not qualify as prostitution under the relevant New York statute. She claimed that the Manhattan District Attorney's office selectively targets "escort services" for prosecution, while ignoring distributors of adult films, who are engaged in what is essentially the same activity.
(FindLaw) - Jenny Paulino stands accused of running a prostitution ring on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.Īmong other defense arguments, Paulino moved to dismiss the case on Equal Protection grounds.
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