Polk County Sheriff\nLawrence Crow, Jr \nBARTOW, FL - The last two adult businesses in Polk County, Florida - Video X-tra and Varsity Video Store - have agreed to close by June 30, 2002. The agreements are said to be part of pre-trial intervention agreements finished Monday.
This puts an end to legal wrangling going back to 1996, when the businesses' owners and operators and the Varsity's landlord were arrested on obscenity charges for selling sexually-explicit videos from their stores. The deal also means Video X-tra drops a pair of federal lawsuits stemming from the 1996 arrests, Reuters says.
Reuters says the deal means the owners duck prosecution under Florida's Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). State Attorney Jerry Hill has used the statute to pressure adult businesses to close, and the deal also means the owners can no longer open or operate adult businesses in Hill's three-county judicial district.
Polk County Sheriff Lawrence Crow, Jr. is claiming victory at last, but noted First Amendment attorney David Wasserman, who represented both Varsity and Video X-tra, says that might be a tad premature, since nothing in the deal stops the Varsity from relocating in the county under different ownership or suing the county and the state attorney's office.
"If they think they've purged the community of sex, they need a psychiatrist," Wasserman said. "They are imposing an artificial community standard at the point of a gun. Human sexuality is not a crime."
Then why did the stores agree to the deal? Wasserman says the answer is purely economic, telling Reuters the Varsity had withstood two previous prosecutions before 1996 and spent about a million dollars over the years defending itself in obscenity cases.
Since Hill and Crow took their respective offices, Reuters says, they emphasized a war on adult businesses to the point where vice detectives probed over one hundred adult businesses, many of which complained about harsh treatment from investigators and prosecutors.
"Jerry and I have seen our names on lawsuits so many times, I don't even read them when they come to desk anymore," Crow tells Reuters. "But they've all been dropped. We haven't paid a dime."
