Lawyers for the shuttered online sex ad site Backpage.com, which was seized by the federal government in April of last year, appeared in federal court Tuesday morning to argue that the government violated the First Amendment rights of the site’s co-founders, Michael Lacey and James Larkin, when it moved to seize, as AVN.com has reported, more that $100 million in cash and property from the two men.
“Can the federal government simply declare a website beyond the reach of the First Amendment, indict those associated with it, and seize proceeds derived from that publishing enterprise, in addition to other assets belonging to the defendants and their families?” asked the site Front Page Confidential, a “free speech” news site also owned by Lacey and Larkin.
In an earlier interview with Wired Magazine, Lacey and Larkin claimed that the government was unconstitutionally attempting to deprive them of means to mount a legal defense by seizing their financial assets, leaving them no way to pay for the costly process.
The lawyers planned to argue that courts have established a tougher standard for allowing the government to seize assets in First Amendment cases, requiring an “adversarial hearing” in court before they can seize assets from defendants, the Register newspaper reported prior to the hearing.
In an email to supporters, quoted by the Register, Lacey and Larkin accused federal prosecutors of attempting an “end run” around their rights to free expression under the First Amendment.
But a three-judge panel at the hearing in the Ninth Circuit appeals court in Pasadena, California, appeared less interested in the First Amendment issues than in whether the case should be sent back to federal district court to make a definitive ruling on the issue—with the judges appearing inclined to send the case back to that court for another hearing, rather than make a ruling themselves.
“Oral arguments today before the Ninth Circuit centered more on procedural issues than the meat and potatoes of the First Amendment arguments,” lamented Lacey and Larkin’s Front Page Confidential site.
The 70-year-old Lacey and Larkin, 69, had been scheduled for trial on January 15, 2020. But earlier this month, a federal judge pushed the date back by almost five months, to May 5.
Photos by Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, Sacramento County Sheriff's Office
