The defense lawyer for Jennifer Dute, the amateur porn star currently being retried on obscenity charges after her conviction was overturned on appeal last year, has shifted his strategy for the case.
In a report by the Cincinnati Post, H. Louis Sirkin stated that he intended to drop his first amendment defense for Dute, who is being retried on four pandering obscenity charges. Instead, Sirkin filed a motion to dismiss the charges against Dute yesterday on the grounds that the charges violated her right to privacy.
Sirkin is basing his new argument on a legal decision from Alabama where courts ruled that because sexual devices were used in private, the sale of such devices through the mail wasn't illegal because they were used in private.
Dute had made amateur porn videos, directed by her husband. She had sex with multiple partners in the video. She sold the videos through the mail, much like the Alabama case.
"This case does not involve the right of privacy. It involves a public sale of allegedly obscene videotapes," Hamilton County assistant prosecutor Brad Greenburg told the Post.
Dute was convicted in 2002 of pandering obscenity after selling via mail to undercover deputies, but had her conviction overturned because the jury that convicted her was denied the opportunity to watch a comparable video that had previously been deemed not obscene by another jury in Hamilton County.
Dute, who is pregnant, served about seven months of that sentence before her conviction was overturned by a divided appeals court that ruled she should get a new trial.
