D.C. Madam, RIP

Deborah Jeane Palfrey, dubbed the D.C. Madam by the news media, reportedly committed suicide today. Palfrey was convicted just over two weeks ago on federal money laundering, mail fraud and racketeering charges, all of which arose from her operation of an alleged prostitution ring. As readers of this blog know, I have been harshly critical of the federal government’s prosecution of Palfrey. I simply fail to see how one woman runni9ng an escort service purportedly as a front for prostitution ought to be any business of the federal government (for those who will argue that Palfrey’s activities violated the letter of the federal statutes under which she was charged, save your breath – I am well aware of the borad uses to which federal prosecutors put such statutes. My point is – and has been – that reading those statutes so expansively as to include Palfrey is stupid, and a colossal waste of federal resources). So it turns out, as usual, that the only victim in the whole D.C. Madam affair was Deborah Jean Palfrey. This time, the consequences were tragic. Chalk up another win for the feds. One less madam to worry about tonight.

D.C. Madam Convicted

A federal jury in the District of Columbia yesterday convicted the so-called “D.C. Madam,” Deborah Jeane Palfrey, on “racketeering” charges (read, money laundering) arising out of her operation of an escort service, The Washington Post reported this morning. Palfrey’s defense was, I would agree, not believable: she claimed that she did not know that the women employed as escorts by her business were engaging in sex with clients. Uh huh. The only thing sillier is that this case was prosecuted in the first place. Thank heavens for the federales, keeping the Republic safe. Perhaps now they will focus on protecting us from Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds.,

D.C. Madam Trial To Start

This week’s edition of Washington’s “Legal Times” contains an article on the D.C. Madam trial, which starts this week. By all accounts, the trial ought to be great entertainment – so long as we forget that this woman is being persecuted prosecuted, and faces jail time, for what is an utterly stupid crime. When will the Feds get back to chasing real criminals, like Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Tammie Thomas? Oh, wait, they are. Silly me.

Why Is Prostitution Illegal?

Cathy Young of Reason magazine very persuasively argues that the continuing criminalization of prostitution is the real scandal that has been exposed in the D.C. Madam fiasco:

The resignation of Randall Tobias, the chief of the Bush administration’s foreign aid programs, for “personal reasons” following the revelation that he had engaged the services of two escort-service workers has provided rich grist for amusement on the punditry circuit. There was indeed plenty of material for humor in the situation, from Tobias’s strong stand in favor of abstinence teaching in AIDS prevention programs to his “I didn’t inhale”-style assertion that he never had sex with the women. But the predictable laughs have obscured a much larger issue than hypocrisy in the ranks of social conservatives. The reason Tobias’s call-girl adventures became public is that the owner of the Washington, DC-based service, Pamela Martin, is facing prosecution and has turned her records over to news organizations to help pay for her legal defense.

Even those who feel a certain schadenfreude at Tobias’s downfall should be asking the question: should there have been a criminal case in the first place?

Prostitution is currently legal in virtually all developed nations, though often surrounded by restrictions and regulations. It is illegal everywhere in the United States except Nevada and, by a legal quirk, in Rhode Island if all transactions are conducted in a private residence.

Yet prostitution is perhaps the ultimate victimless crime: a consensual transaction in which both parties are supposedly committing a crime, and the person most likely to be charged—the one selling sex—is also the one most likely to be viewed as the victim. (A bizarre inversion of this situation occurs in Sweden, where, as a result of feminist pressure to treat prostitutes as victims, it is now a crime to pay for sex but not to offer it for sale.) It is sometimes claimed that the true victims of prostitution are the johns’ wives. But surely women whose husbands are involved in noncommercial—and sometimes quite expensive—extramarital affairs are no less victimized.

Another common claim is that prostitution causes direct harm by contributing to the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV/AIDS. However, that may be the reddest herring of them all. In Australia, where sex for money is legal, the rate of HIV infection among female prostitutes is so low that prostitution has been removed from the list of known risk factors in HIV surveillance. In the U.S., reliable data are more difficult to come by, but a 1987 Centers for Disease Control study likewise found very low infection rates among prostitutes.

It’s the criminalization of prostitution that does take actual victims. Take Brandy Britton, briefly notorious as “Madam Professor.” In January 2001 the 41-year old Britton, who had taught sociology and anthropology at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County until quitting in 1999 amidst conflicts with colleagues and allegations of falsifying research, was arrested on prostitution charges. Britton had allegedly advertised on the Internet as “Alexis Angel,” “a very passionate full-service, GFE (girl friend experience) escort and erotic masseuse,” stressing her intelligence and education and charging from $300 an hour to $2,500 a day for her services. A year later, the week before her scheduled trial, Britton committed suicide.

While Britton may not have led an admirable life—her last occupation aside, her academic career seems to have been undone by professional misconduct and a habit of making unsubstantiated sex-discrimination charges—surely her death was a needless tragedy. It’s hard to see who benefited from the fact that the authorities in Maryland spent a lot of taxpayer money to investigate and prosecute a woman for discreet and private sexual encounters with men—encounters that would have been perfectly legal if, instead of directly paying her for sex, those men had spent an equivalent amount on dates and gifts.

As with other victimless crimes, the criminalization of prostitution creates a vast breeding ground for corruption, hypocrisy, and morally dubious law enforcement tactics. Thus, open advertisement of escort services is widely tolerated under the flimsy pretext that clients are paying for companionship, “modeling,” “role play” and other non-sexual activities, and that when sex occurs it’s by mutual choice unrelated to any fees. Selective enforcement is the norm, as is entrapment. Anti-prostitution campaigns are also frequently accompanied by the Big Brother-ish practice of state-sponsored public shaming. Not to mention how black market constitution makes it more difficult to police the sex slave trade, where the prostitutes really are victims.

Unlike some defenders of prostitution such as “Mayflower Madam” Sydney Biddle Barrows, I do not believe that selling sex should ever be seen as an empowering or liberating way of life, or an affirmation of female sexuality. (If anything, it perpetuates the notion that sex is something women do for male enjoyment.) I do not believe, as sex-positive feminist Susie Bright has written, that “sex-work professionals are [among] the future’s largest contingents of the new het-sex liberation front.” Nor do I think that disapproval of sex for profit invariably stems from a residual notion that sex is bad, or that “sex work” should be destigmatized as just another career. But there is a vast difference between social stigma and criminal prosecution, between personal moral judgment and the nanny state.

Source: Reason.com

Federal Judge Enjoins D.C. Madam From Releasing More Phone Records

The Washington Post reports that the federal judge presiding over the D.C. Madam case has enjoined the alleged Madam, Jeane Palfrey, from making any further release of her phone records:

Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the woman accused of being the D.C. madam, can’t release any more phone records that would reveal patrons of her Washington escort service, a federal judge said yesterday.

U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler placed a temporary restraining order on Palfrey and her civil attorney, prohibiting them from sharing additional phone records with news organizations or the public.

Palfrey and her attorney had prompted — critics said encouraged — speculation in the past few months about who might be publicly identified as a client after they turned over a sizable portion of her business phone records to the ABC News program “20/20.”

Palfrey has said that she regretted any embarrassment felt by her former customers but that she was letting a news organization mine her records so she could find potential defense witnesses and fight government charges that she ran an illegal prostitution ring. Palfrey said her escorts provided legal massages and fantasies.

Yesterday, she questioned the government’s motive in asking the judge to keep her records secret.

“What is the Government trying to hide by prohibiting further distribution of the records?” she said in an e-mail to The Washington Post. “More importantly, who are they attempting to protect?”

ABC News reporters’ calls to possible customers last month ultimately led Deputy Secretary of State Randall L. Tobias to resign after he acknowledged using Palfrey’s escort service. Tobias said he got a massage, not sex.

In her order, Kessler said she is concerned about statements by Palfrey and her attorney that they would release her remaining customer records for 1996 to 2002.

In a letter dated Sunday, Palfrey’s civil attorney, Montgomery Blair Sibley, had demanded that Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales conduct a special investigation into what Sibley described as an unfair prosecution of Palfrey’s business. Sibley said that he would release Palfrey’s phone records for all to peruse — including Internet bloggers — if Gonzales did not take action.

Noting that ABC News had identified one federal prosecutor — now deceased — in its review of Palfrey’s phone records, Sibley suggested that the remaining records probably contain the numbers of other notable customers and escorts.

“Consider the math: If 20% of the telephone records produced one ‘career Justice Department prosecutor’, then 100% of the telephone records will very likely produce at least another four (4) ‘career Justice Department prosecutors.’ ” Sibley wrote in his letter.

The judge said that such a release would amount to witness intimidation and violate an earlier order she had imposed on Palfrey.

“The clear inference to be drawn is that there will be a wholesale release of all telephone records possessed by Ms. Palfrey,” Kessler wrote in her order.

Palfrey’s new criminal attorney, Preston Burton, whom Kessler formally appointed Monday, would not comment yesterday on the order. He said he will address the judge at the next hearing in the case, scheduled for May 21.

I can answer Mr. Sibley’s questrion – the Court is trying to protect the integrity of the trial process by stopping his client from intimidating possible witnesses against her. The REAL question in why the feds are wasting money prosecuting this woman. Where is the crime?

Source: The Washington Post

Bad News for the D.C.Madam

Now here is something about which I am just stunned. Really. It seems that one of the former clients of Jeane Palfrey’s escort service, Harlan Ullman, is prepared to testify that he did in fact have sex with women he hired through the service. Which would appear to give the lie to Palfrey’s ridiculous defense in this case, which was that no sex happened. Not a good development for Madam Palfrey, I’d say. Assuming that she stands firm in her refusal to accept a plea, and assuming the reports are true regarding Mr. Ullman’s expected testimony, I would predict that Ms. Palfrey will be convicted and do time.

D.C. Madam Naming Names

If there wasn’t a federal prosecution involved, there would be a lot to be amused about in the D.C. Madam case. As the LA Times reported today, Deborah Jeane Palfrey plans to “out” her former clients in the hope that the unfortunate men will scramble to corroborate her claim that nothing naughty went on when they hired girls from her service. Now, I’m not sure what’s more silly – the claims from Palfrey and her clients that there was no money for sex involved in her business, or the feds determination to prosecute this so called crime.

D.C. Madam Pleads Not Guilty

I am glad to see that, after the Scooter Libby show trial (about which I will have more to say), the storm troopers in the District of Columbia are back to pursuing real criminals, making the world safe from high end prostitutes.  Why do they bother with this stuff?