Change of Venue Denied in Ray Guhn Case
Lawyer didn’t produce sufficient evidence to be granted request.
By: Bianca Fox
Posted: 09/19/2007
PENSACOLA, Fla.
- The case of adult webmaster Ray Guhn has been refused a change-of-venue
request made by Guhn's lawyer and will be heard on Oct. 16 at the Santa Rosa
County Courthouse, a judge ruled Monday.
The charges made last year against
Guhn include money laundering, obscenity, racketeering and prostitution. They were
dropped by prosecutors in July 2006 in Escambia County
and refiled at the Santa Rosa County Courthouse. Guhn was arrested, and an
investigation of his company, Global Technologies Inc., and its operations
followed. Guhn shot content for CumOnHerFace.com, which is part of the Cash
Titans affiliate program he owns.
Guhn could be sentenced to as
many as 60 years in prison, with an additional 30 years for money laundering.
The judge ruled that in order
to be granted a change of venue, Guhn's lawyer, Lawrence Walters, would have to
prove that the prosecution acted in bad faith when it refiled the charges in Santa Rosa County. According to Walters, evidence
was "unavailable"; the judge decided to keep the case pending in Santa Rosa County.
"Unless we were able to do
show evidence, the judge felt that the case could proceed on and that the state
had the option of bringing the charges in this county, even though they had
gone forward for a year of litigation in the previous county," Walters said
Wednesday. "We have argued otherwise, and there is Florida case law that
suggests that just the fact of dismissing the case in the attempt to get a
different jury is enough to prove a due-process violation without having to
prove any bad faith, and, frankly, it is very difficult to prove that faith
anyway because it really requires you to try to convince the court of what the
prosecutor was thinking and what their motive and intent was, which is almost
impossible to do in any case."
Walters now is starting from
scratch in a new county and preparing for trial there. Because he handles obscenity
cases on a county-by-county basis, he said, he looks at the demographics of
each county to decide how to present the case, what experts to use and what
evidence to introduce.
"For example, we can use
comparable materials being available in the county either at local video stores
or on the Internet, or at various outlets," Walters said. "If you go to
different places, you know, if you start to file charges in new counties, then
you have to look at all those issues fresh. So, in some ways, we are starting
from scratch with the litigation-strategies standpoint and from a witness-list
standpoint. We have to reschedule all the motions. Fortunately, we will not
have to take over all of the dispositions over again that were taken in the Escambia County case, so the prosecutor and the
defense have agreed that we will be able to use all of those dispositions in
this new case. So we are just preparing for a set of motion hearings in
October.
"We are going to get into
some of the constitutional issues in the next hearing. We are going to argue
with some of the issues about the community standards to be applied in this
case, some search-and-seizure challenges and so forth. We are doing everything
we possibly can to acquit [Guhn] of these charges and try to get [the best
ruling] we can."
