PENSACOLA, Fla. - The case of adult webmaster Ray Guhn has been refused a change-of-venue request made by Guhn's lawyer and will be heard on Oct. 16 at the Santa Rosa County Courthouse, a judge ruled Monday.
The charges made last year against Guhn include money laundering, obscenity, racketeering and prostitution. They were dropped by prosecutors in July 2006 in Escambia County and refiled at the Santa Rosa County Courthouse. Guhn was arrested, and an investigation of his company, Global Technologies Inc., and its operations followed. Guhn shot content for CumOnHerFace.com, which is part of the Cash Titans affiliate program he owns.
Guhn could be sentenced to as many as 60 years in prison, with an additional 30 years for money laundering.
The judge ruled that in order to be granted a change of venue, Guhn's lawyer, Lawrence Walters, would have to prove that the prosecution acted in bad faith when it refiled the charges in Santa Rosa County. According to Walters, evidence was "unavailable"; the judge decided to keep the case pending in Santa Rosa County.
"Unless we were able to do show evidence, the judge felt that the case could proceed on and that the state had the option of bringing the charges in this county, even though they had gone forward for a year of litigation in the previous county," Walters said Wednesday. "We have argued otherwise, and there is Florida case law that suggests that just the fact of dismissing the case in the attempt to get a different jury is enough to prove a due-process violation without having to prove any bad faith, and, frankly, it is very difficult to prove that faith anyway because it really requires you to try to convince the court of what the prosecutor was thinking and what their motive and intent was, which is almost impossible to do in any case."
Walters now is starting from scratch in a new county and preparing for trial there. Because he handles obscenity cases on a county-by-county basis, he said, he looks at the demographics of each county to decide how to present the case, what experts to use and what evidence to introduce.
"For example, we can use comparable materials being available in the county either at local video stores or on the Internet, or at various outlets," Walters said. "If you go to different places, you know, if you start to file charges in new counties, then you have to look at all those issues fresh. So, in some ways, we are starting from scratch with the litigation-strategies standpoint and from a witness-list standpoint. We have to reschedule all the motions. Fortunately, we will not have to take over all of the dispositions over again that were taken in the Escambia County case, so the prosecutor and the defense have agreed that we will be able to use all of those dispositions in this new case. So we are just preparing for a set of motion hearings in October.
"We are going to get into some of the constitutional issues in the next hearing. We are going to argue with some of the issues about the community standards to be applied in this case, some search-and-seizure challenges and so forth. We are doing everything we possibly can to acquit [Guhn] of these charges and try to get [the best ruling] we can."
