Ex-CDBabes Owner Almost Off The Legal Hook

Former CDBabes.com owner Mike Jones could be off the hook by late April, if the state of Illinois does not appeal a judge's rejection of a state attorney's motion to reconsider the results of a search warrant the judge suppressed in January.

The state has until April 20 to file a motion to appeal, which would move the case to the Illinois Appellate Court, 2nd Division. Jones himself could not be reached for comment by AVN.com before this story went to press, but his attorney, J.D. Obenberger, said the state might not win an appeal, because Illinois appellate courts tend as an unwritten rule to uphold a trial judge's findings of fact, as opposed to findings of law.

Judge Sharon Prather held in a March 19 hearing that that the 2001 search warrant against Jones's home and office "was unreasonably excessive in the way it was executed," Obenberger told AVN.com. "That's a finding of fact. On a finding of fact, and this is at least an issue of facts and law, the appellate courts are less likely to overturn a judge on the finding of fact."

State Attorney Dan Regna had argued that the warrant should have been divided into individual issues, child porn and obscenity, both of which were covered by the original warrant. Obenberger said Regna's argument came down to the seizure of alleged child porn not requiring "pre-seizure judicial review," but Prather held that there was no way to divide the original warrant into two warrants, and that the original warrant merely let the state seize whatever it wanted.

Obenberger's associate, Reid Lee, whose specialty is constitutional law, argued that while it does not, indeed, require a warrant to arrest or seize for child porn, there had never been an actual definition of child porn in the Jones case.

The state now has three options in the case: filing a written notice of appeal with the trial court, moving it to the state appellate court; moving to re-indict Jones based on material that had been on the original CDBabes.com Website alone, as opposed to what was seized from home and office; or, dismiss the case.

Obenberger said a status hearing was tentatively scheduled for three days (April 23) past the state's appellate filing deadline, "so it would be too late for them to file an appeal if they haven't done it by the [30-day deadline]."

Jones sold CDBabes.com in December 2003. The Website has since been sold again, to Slaughter Productions, which has announced it bought all rights to the content brokerage site from L & M Enterprises.