Gee what a great way to use taxpayer money. It's great to hear that there were no serious crimes being committed so that those cops had time to harass their citizens.
I think you may have nailed it in the first paragraph. If they weren't liscensed for massage they may have been violating state law. Other than that it doesn't make sense, but then from what I hear Key West is an "interesting" place where a lot of things don't quite make sense.
The laws against prostitution in many areas are rarely enforced. Somewhere recently I read an opinion that a massage girl is much more likely to be arrested than a full-service escort, because the police who have responsibility for enforcing laws against prostitution don't much care because they have much more important things to worry about, whereas licensing violations are the primary concern of the state board that licenses massage therapists.
Which reminds me of a really amusing incident - there's a brothel on the main street (Duval Street) of Key West that operates quite openly and has done so for years. The girls (at least they look like girls but in Key West one never knows) sit on the front porch soliciting customers under a big sign listing their services. (The place actually bills itself as a bath house.) A couple years ago they were required to remove the word "massage" from their sign. You can still get a nude bath including a BJ or FS but you can't get a massage. Does this make sense to anyone?
Well, I'm not going to pretend to know as much about the law as ChiTown, but obviously the "privacy right" has it's limits. The recent medical marijuana case was an interesting point because a person growing their own weed, not for sale, and for purely personal use was not protected from federal prosecution, but don't get me started, you know how I get. As far as the "privacy right" it was initially marital privacy, not privacy in general, because under a privacy right, a real privacy right, I have a hard time understanding how any search warrant could be legal. However, all us old school federalist would say quite simply, Federal laws against prostitution are unconstitutional, they're a state matter.
_Lawrence v. Texas_ holds that the state cannot prosecute for homosexual acts performed by consenting adults in private.
There was a serious question as to whether the whole case was a set-up...the raid in which the police found the defendants engaged in anal sex was made in response to a call for disturbing the peace...but the caller was never identified, and no specific breach of the peace was ever identified. However, when the local police investigated, they entered the defendants' apartment (after getting no response to their knocking). It was suggested that defendants who really wanted to resist the charges would have filed motions to quash their arrests on the basis of illegal search and seizure, and these motions may well have been granted. The attorneys who argued the case for the Texas attorney general before the Supreme Court claimed that the whole situation was a set-up on the part of gay rights advocates to force an issue to the Supreme Court, and that the Court should have dismissed the case on the basis that it did not involve a real "case and controversy", which is required under Article III of the COnstitution.
Actually, in light of the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in _Lawrence v. Texas_, the presumption seems to be that consenting private conduct between consenting adults is immune from government regulation, based on the right to privacy that the Supreme Court invented in the 1960s, first to strike down laws against interracial marriage (Loving v. Oklahoma), then to strike down laws against providing birth control information to married couples (Griswold v. Connecticut), then finally to find a right to abortion in Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court "found" this right to privacy by cobbling together different parts of the Constitution, such as the Fifth Amendment right to remain silent and (I am not making this up) the Third Amendment right not to have soldiers quartered in your home during peacetime (Roe v. Wade is the only US Supreme Court that draws on the Third Amendment). The COurt has found that, though the COnstitution does not explicitly talk about a right to privacy, the "sense of the document" provides the basis for such a right.
However, the right to privacy is one of the "Second tier" rights, that can be infringed upon if there is a sufficiently compelling public interest(Usually termed "health, safety and morals)". If someone was to argue that prostitution should be legalized because it involves private sexual conduct between consenting adults, I would guess that the anti-prostitution laws would pass muster on the basis that the State has a compelling interest in protecting public health, and that commercial sex involves health issues, including those that can affect the public at large, such that the state has a right to regulate it, including outlawing it. These are the arguments used to uphold mandatory vaccination laws against those people and groups who argue that such laws infringe on their right of privacy.
There could also be the argument that commercial sex tends to be caught up in organized crime, and that by outlawing prostitution, the legislature sought to achieve the permissible goal of promoting law enforcement. (In evaluating whether a law is permissible, the Court will not look at whether the law is the best way of achieving a particular end, or whether the law actually worked to achieve that end, but only whether the Legislature could reasonably have thought that the law could promote the desired goal)
When _Lawrence_ was announced, my first thought was that every LDS man in Utah who is doing time for polygamy should have his lawyer file a habeus corpus petition for his release. However, most polygamists are in jail for welfare fraud or child sexual assault, not polygamy.
What part of the Constitution could be construed to protect prostituion? I'm afraid it would take one hell of an activist judge to go along with any argument I can imagine. The question of whether prohibiting prostitution and drugs is bad policy is an entirely different matter. There are a lot of sound advocates for repealing those laws. Maybe chitownlawyer can speak with more authority on all of this.
In the St. Louis area, prostitution laws are rarely enforced, and when they are, it is usually streetwalkers how are the targets. Although occasionally I do hear about a bust on an escort service. Several months ago, the NYC cops busted a couple of the top tier escort services.
There was a bust around here about four months ago. The state cops told all the real hookers to get off the streets for a couple of days, and brought in female state troopers from outside the area to pose as hookers. When the johns would proposition the hookers, the girls would tell the guys that the act would be done "around that corner over there." Of course, "around that corner over there" were 15-20 state and local cops, several camcorders, and whatever fish they caught before the current guy. One guy was quoted on the camcorder as saying, "I knew she couldn't be a real whore..she was too good looking."
Whenever I read about one of these busts in the paper, it amazes me how common the name "John DOe" is.
A colleague represented a guy who got caught, and was a year away from getting his teacher's pension. To avoid the morals conviction (which would jeopardize his teaching job, and therefore his pension), they pled the guy to "disorderly conduct," which has a greater fine than misdemeanor solicitation, but fewer "collateral consequences."
Federal laws against prostitution would not necessarily be illegal, depending on whether the law is written in such a way to come within the Commerce Clause, that portion of the Federal COnstitution that says that the federal government may regulate interstate commerce. I don't doubt that a federal law prohibiting interstate commerce for the purpose of promoting "traffic in women" would be constitutional.. In fact there was such a law for many years, the so-called Mann Act. I'm not sure if it was ever repealed, but it was abused for many years to get men who took their girlfriends across state lines (there was no requirement that the sex be paid for, although the statute certainly also implicated paid sex---but it was considered "commerce" that you paid for the gas in the vehicle that carried your girlfriend across state lines, bought her plane ticket, paid for her meals in another state, etc.) This was how they got the famous black boxer James Jefferson about a hundred years ago. Of course, this was passed at a time when most states had adultery/fornication statutes. I'm not sure that the federal government could punish activity that was not a crime in the state where the actors came from, nor in which they committed the act.
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Which reminds me of a really amusing incident - there's a brothel on the main street (Duval Street) of Key West that operates quite openly and has done so for years. The girls (at least they look like girls but in Key West one never knows) sit on the front porch soliciting customers under a big sign listing their services. (The place actually bills itself as a bath house.) A couple years ago they were required to remove the word "massage" from their sign. You can still get a nude bath including a BJ or FS but you can't get a massage. Does this make sense to anyone?
Me - So you're in favor of abortion, why?
She - The government has no right to tell a woman what she can and cannot do with her body.
Me - Oh, so your in favor of legalizing prostution?
It's a show stopper every time.
There was a serious question as to whether the whole case was a set-up...the raid in which the police found the defendants engaged in anal sex was made in response to a call for disturbing the peace...but the caller was never identified, and no specific breach of the peace was ever identified. However, when the local police investigated, they entered the defendants' apartment (after getting no response to their knocking). It was suggested that defendants who really wanted to resist the charges would have filed motions to quash their arrests on the basis of illegal search and seizure, and these motions may well have been granted. The attorneys who argued the case for the Texas attorney general before the Supreme Court claimed that the whole situation was a set-up on the part of gay rights advocates to force an issue to the Supreme Court, and that the Court should have dismissed the case on the basis that it did not involve a real "case and controversy", which is required under Article III of the COnstitution.
However, the right to privacy is one of the "Second tier" rights, that can be infringed upon if there is a sufficiently compelling public interest(Usually termed "health, safety and morals)". If someone was to argue that prostitution should be legalized because it involves private sexual conduct between consenting adults, I would guess that the anti-prostitution laws would pass muster on the basis that the State has a compelling interest in protecting public health, and that commercial sex involves health issues, including those that can affect the public at large, such that the state has a right to regulate it, including outlawing it. These are the arguments used to uphold mandatory vaccination laws against those people and groups who argue that such laws infringe on their right of privacy.
There could also be the argument that commercial sex tends to be caught up in organized crime, and that by outlawing prostitution, the legislature sought to achieve the permissible goal of promoting law enforcement. (In evaluating whether a law is permissible, the Court will not look at whether the law is the best way of achieving a particular end, or whether the law actually worked to achieve that end, but only whether the Legislature could reasonably have thought that the law could promote the desired goal)
When _Lawrence_ was announced, my first thought was that every LDS man in Utah who is doing time for polygamy should have his lawyer file a habeus corpus petition for his release. However, most polygamists are in jail for welfare fraud or child sexual assault, not polygamy.
There was a bust around here about four months ago. The state cops told all the real hookers to get off the streets for a couple of days, and brought in female state troopers from outside the area to pose as hookers. When the johns would proposition the hookers, the girls would tell the guys that the act would be done "around that corner over there." Of course, "around that corner over there" were 15-20 state and local cops, several camcorders, and whatever fish they caught before the current guy. One guy was quoted on the camcorder as saying, "I knew she couldn't be a real whore..she was too good looking."
Whenever I read about one of these busts in the paper, it amazes me how common the name "John DOe" is.
A colleague represented a guy who got caught, and was a year away from getting his teacher's pension. To avoid the morals conviction (which would jeopardize his teaching job, and therefore his pension), they pled the guy to "disorderly conduct," which has a greater fine than misdemeanor solicitation, but fewer "collateral consequences."