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NY judge supports charge mentioned as possibility for Spitzer

April 11, 2008

A federal judge spoke supportively Thursday of a 1910 law used to combat prostitution and mentioned by legal experts as a charge prosecutors may consider bringing against former Gov. Eliot Spitzer in the escort scandal that cost him his job.

U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein discussed the Mann Act as he sentenced a woman to two years and a month in prison for her conviction in the prosecution of the operators of a string of massage parlors that used Korean immigrants transported from state to state.

After a lawyer tried to minimize the importance of the Mann Act in the case, the judge said it was used early last century to discourage those who trafficked in destitute women in eastern and southeastern Europe from doing the same in the United States.

“The Mann Act did not want this country to be an attraction to people who did that kind of purveying in other countries,” he said. “The Mann Act has as a purpose, I believe, to make sure that anyone who did this in the United States of America _ that is create a brothel for the purpose of which was to attract women from abroad to come here _ was violating the law and deserves punishment.”

The woman being sentenced worked at a Queens massage parlor. She was among five people convicted in the prosecution of the operators of massage parlors across the northeastern United States.

The judge defended the use of the Mann Act after a defense lawyer, Susan Wolfe, argued that her client deserved leniency in part because the law was not meant to be used to regulate voluntary prostitution.

“The fact that the women involved in this case were not whipped or were not kept in deplorable conditions doesn’t take it out of the heartland of the Mann Act,” the judge said.

The judge said he understood that people with limited opportunities to earn money are attracted to the profession.

“It goes without saying, a woman who sells her body for the enjoyment of men who pay is diminishing what makes us unique as human beings … engaging in culpable, immoral criminal conduct,” he said.

Wolfe said there was another side to the argument.

“In this society we all sell what we have,” she said, citing models and actors who sell their beauty or other professionals who sell their intelligence. “This particular society says you can’t use this thing you have, your sexuality, in order to support yourself. But maybe it’s all you have.”

Spitzer resigned as governor just days after he was exposed as one of the customers of a New York escort service broken up with the arrest of four of its operators.

Federal prosecutors have refused to discuss any possible charges that could be brought against Spitzer. But legal experts say one possibility is the Mann Act, though it has rarely been used against the customers of an escort.

Court papers allege Spitzer arranged for a high-priced escort to travel from New York to his Washington, D.C., hotel room on Feb. 13.

Spitzer resigned March 22, saying, “I cannot allow my private failings to disrupt the people’s work.” He was succeeded by Lt. Gov. David Paterson.

Source: Newsday

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