Court Upholds "Porn is Not Prostitution" Principle

Via The Legal Satyricon, The Volokh Conspiracy, Polymorphous Perversity, and the Concord Monitor comes news of one of the few triumphs for the much-beseiged right of sexual expression. In this case, the legal principle distinguishing porn production from prostitution has once again been upheld in, of all places, New Hampshire. This legal principle is enshrined in the case of California v. Freeman and, although this case is not binding in any state other than California, the distinction it makes between paying somebody to have sex with you versus paying for a sexual performance has been largely upheld elsewhere in the US. It was most recently challenged in New Hampshire in the case of State v. Theriault, with the final result that New Hampshire Supreme Court upheld the Freeman principle.

Who the hell makes porn in New Hampshire you might ask? In this case the old maxim about "hard cases make bad law" seems to have been reversed, with some good law being harvested out of a dodgy case. Apparently, the defendent, Robert Theriault, was a county court baliff who approached a couple (while still in uniform, apparently) who had just paid a traffic ticket and offered them money to make a "fuck flick". According to an earlier article, this was accompanied by a story about how he was "an investigator" testing different kinds of condoms, as well as the ability of different electric blankets to increase sperm count. (You can't make this stuff up.) The couple actually went through with a sexual performance for this guy, but later had a change of heart about the whole thing. Eventually, the incident was reported to the police and the fool was quite rightly releived of his job as baliff. However, he was also arrested and charged with soliciting prostitution, something he was successfully convicted of in lower courts.

Ultimately, the State Supreme Court did what it was supposed to do, and didn't allow the urge to punish one person's sketchy activities to impinge on everybody's rights. Its unfortunate the court in the Max Hardcore case wasn't operating on the same principle.