from www.adultcybermart.com – Did Sheriff Grady Judd pick on the wrong people this time?

Called The Boss Man, Judd, 57, is the Sheriff of Polk County, Florida, and a self-proclaimed arbiter of morals. Also known as “America’s sheriff,” Judd keeps a sign saying “Mayberry” sitting at the base of his driveway. If only Judd kept his county running like the jovial sheriff Andy Taylor.

As a kid, Judd played cops and robbers and wanted to be the town sheriff. He hummed the theme from Dragnet. In school, he was gangly and studious. He played no sports. His only extracurricular activity was Future Farmers of America. Judd made enough money to buy a 1970 Chevy Nova by delivering the local newspaper, building septic systems and working on an ambulance crew in Winter Haven. He married his high school steady when he was 18 years old.

He started at the Sheriff’s Office as a dispatcher making $5.48 an hour. He was eager to advance, getting degrees from Polk Community College and Rollins in Orange County and writing letters to his superiors, making suggestions and applying for higher positions.

It worked: Judd was made a deputy at 19, a corporal at 22, a sergeant at 23, a lieutenant at 25, a captain at 27. People called him a workaholic.

Decades before he became sheriff, Judd was a leader within the agency’s vice squad, using laws on lewdness, obscenity and racketeering to close more than 100 strip clubs, escort services, massage parlors and adult video and bookstores. His goal was to rid the 2,010-square-mile county of what he called “smut and dirt.”

Then came the Internet.

In 1995 a trucker nicknamed Slick Rick had a side business in which members paid him $40 a year to look at pictures of naked adults having sex. Slick Rick operated a website from his master bedroom, but the sheriff’s detectives in their probable cause affidavit had trouble describing what Slick Rick was doing.

“The method of transporting a picture through a computer modem,” they wrote, “is referred to as ‘downloading’ …” Strange words had to be put inside quotes. “Files.” “Saved.”

“This pornography,” Judd told reporters, “was easily accessible to anyone with a computer.”

“With the proliferation of computers,” Judd added, “we have a proliferation of computer crime.”

Nine years later, Judd was elected sheriff, winning 64 percent of the vote in a three-man race. Judd called it “God’s will.”

He was re-elected in 2008 in a landslide. His supporters say he’ll be Polk County’s sheriff for as long as he wants to be though in 2002 he weathered one public scandal.

A deputy who later was convicted of giving teen boys anal probes on a steel table in his home was involved in an unnecessary early morning high-speed pursuit in an undercover car that never flashed its lights, resulting in the death of a 16-year-old boy.

The agency’s investigation into the incident was shoddy at best according to a newspaper report. Judd wasn’t yet sheriff, but he was a high-ranking administrator involved in the agency’s response to the family’s civil suit.

Judd has never commented publicly about the case. Another black eye against his office, which Judd stays clear of, involves one of his female deputies, Robin Leigh Pagoria. Pagoria filmed herself strapping naked children to a desk while spanking them with sex toys. Pagoria then sent the videos to a boyfriend she met on a fetish website.

In May of this year Pagoria was charged with aggravated child abuse, production of child pornography, promotion of child pornography and possession of child pornography.

According to an arrest report, the two children, described only as girls between the ages of 10 and 18, described in graphic detail multiple spanking sessions.

Investigators say Pagoria cut the legs off one end of the desk she used for the spanking. To keep the girls from moving, she handcuffed their arms and tied their ankles to the desk.

The girls told investigators how Pagoria also beat them with a leather sex paddle. One said she was hit 50 times for being “disrespectful”

Pagoria recorded the beatings on her cell phone then uploaded them to the Internet so her online boyfriend could watch. Pagoria claimed she videotaped the sessions so she could review and “‘fine tune’ her technique” – leading her to modify the table, and to put a delay between blows for “maximum burn.”

After the whippings, Pagoria explained that the girls were forced to stand naked in the corner “so that they could reflect on what they had done wrong.”

As the poster boy for redneck law and order, Grady Judd is known for his fascistic intolerance of crooks and criminals. In fact, you don’t even have to be a crook or criminal in Sheriff Grady’s book, except look like one.

“I don’t care whether they’re guilty or not,” Sheriff Grady once said.

“That’s of no concern to me. What is of concern to me is that there’s probable cause to believe that they’re guilty.”

In recent weeks, Sheriff Grady, under the probable cause mandate, has banned the playing of basketball at Polk County’s jail, opted for cheaper food on the prison menu and eliminated sports from the choices of inmate TV viewing. Just recently Judd denied the inmates underwear, made from recycled bed sheets, which was provided free by the county.

“There’s no state law; there’s no federal law that says we have to provide underwear in the county jail,” explained Judd.

“Why shouldn’t they pay like the rest of us pay? We pay to maintain the county jail; to keep them there. Certainly they can pay their way as much as they can afford. This is the county jail; it’s not a welfare program.”

Judd claims his novel approach to incarceration would save the county $45,000. Polk County and Sheriff Grady may need those extra bucks to defend themselves in court.

Just last month, Judd was hit with a federal lawsuit filed by EllenBeth Wachs. Wachs, an atheist, claims that Judd has failed to respect the separation of Church and State by making her the subject of several “gestapo” arrests – not because she’s a criminal, but because she doesn’t believe in God.

Here’s where the jail’s basketball nets get involved. When Judd had them removed last December and made them a donation to a local church, Wachs blew the referee’s whistle. Judd explained that he was giving them to children who had little in the way of recreational amenities.

“The children need the opportunity most to interact in a positive safe environment,” Judd explained.

But Wachs didn’t want to hear of it claiming that Judd was playing Santa Claus with taxpayers’ money. Since the basketball issue, Wachs has been arrested three times and charged with two felonies.

Wachs, a retired attorney, was first charged with illegally practicing law, when she signed “esquire” after her name in an open records request about the basketball hoops. That charge then led to a search of Wachs’ house where Judd’s deputies just happened to find marijuana in her safe.

Wachs was also arrested for lewd and lascivious behavior after a child, playing basketball next door, allegedly overheard her moaning in her bedroom.

For that, Wachs spent six days in jail and paid $6,000 in bail. What brings Wachs’ name into this discussion is the fact that her attorney is Lawrence Walters. Walters is also representing porn performer Kimberly Kupps who was arrested on obscenity charges in June.

And, on closer inspection of the lascivious behavior charges leveled against Wachs, they’re very similar to those filed years ago against another one of Walter’s clients, Tammy Robinson. [Read that story HERE]

Kupps, aka Theresa Taylor, and her husband Warren Taylor were jailed earlier this summer after one of Judd’s deputies spent three months investigating porn videos the couple made at home and sold online.

Again, a neighborhood snitch told the cops she was running a production and distribution business out of her home. A police investigator subsequently paid the initial $19.95 membership fee to her website, kimberlykupps.com, where he found videos of Theresa Taylor having sex with men and women, as well as offering some of the clothes she wore in the videos for sale.

The investigator downloaded six videos and allowed County Judge Reinaldo Ojeda to review them. On April 7, Ojeda ruled the videos were obscene material under state law. During questioning, Warren Taylor, 58, said he filmed the videos downloaded by the investigator and uploaded them for sale on the website clips4sale.com. The husband said the couple made an average of $700 monthly for the past four months.

Warren Taylor was booked on six counts each of wholesale promotion of obscene material and distribution of obscene material, a misdemeanor. Theresa Taylor was booked on six counts each of selling obscene material and distributing obscene material.

She was also charged with the felony wholesale promotion of obscene material.

This week Kupps asked a Florida judge through Walters to determine the geographic scope of the “community” as applied to her charges. In an interview with XBiz, attorney Walters said he hoped to build on the foundation laid in the Kilbride case from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which requires the application of national community standards in Internet obscenity cases.

Walters said that times have changed when it comes to charging and prosecuting obscenity cases relative to content posted on the web and that a national community standard is appropriate.

“In the digital age, we all learn of current events, and receive the same information, at virtually the same time as evidenced by events like the viral circulation of risque pictures of former U.S. Representative Anthony Weiner, and news of the recent horrific shooting in Norway,” Walters told XBiz.

“It doesn’t matter where the event occurs, the world learns about it immediately.

“So the idea of a quaint, isolated community that can claim that it maintains a different level of tolerance relating to controversial speech, is as outdated as rabbit ear TV sets. We have more in common with our online friends than with the random people who happen to inhabit the same section of Earth where our homes are located.”

It should be remembered, a similar strategy was proposed by Walters in the Ray Guhn obscenity case from 2008.

Guhn, aka Clinton Raymond McGowen, was arrested as were two of his business associates, Kevin Patrick Stevens and Andrew Kevin Craft. The charges were racketeering- conducting a criminal enterprise by engaging in prostitution and the manufacture and sale of obscene material.

Guhn was the owner of an amateur porn website cumonherface.com, which, according to an affidavit, generated more than $1 million a year in customer sales. The site had somewhere between 5,000 to 8,000 subscribers who each paid $29.95 monthly to view online videos.

Guhn and his associates recruited local Pensacola men and women to perform and were paid between $300 to $1,000. The films were made at homes throughout Pensacola and Pace; at least five hotels in Pensacola; along Interstate 10 and Interstate 110; in wooded areas and in other public places. Guhn and company allegedly threw wild sex parties after the shoots and gave pain pills and cocaine to performers.

In court, Assistant State Attorney Russ Edgar played videos and showed multiple still images culled from the subscription Web site. Edgar believed the site contained obscene material, not protected by the Constitution, based on the community standards of the First Judicial Circuit of Florida, which encompasses Escambia, Santa Rosa, Okaloosa and Walton Counties.

Walters had planned to present evidence of data from the Google search engine to show jurors that residents of Pensacola aren’t adverse to downloading pornography.

“We believed we could show that Pensacola had a very heavy appetite for sexual expression,” Walters said.

Rather than show broad availability of sex-related Web sites, Walters also planned to show both accessibility and interest in the material within the jurisdiction of the First Circuit Court for Santa Rosa County, where the trial was scheduled.

The search data Walters was using is available through a service called Google Trends (trends.google.com). It allows users to compare search trends in a given area, showing, for instance, that residents of Pensacola are more likely to search for sexual terms than some more wholesome ones.

Walters chose Pensacola because it is the only city in the court’s jurisdiction large enough to be singled out in the service’s data.

“We tried to come up with comparison search terms that would embody typical American values,” Walters said.

“What is more American than apple pie?” But according to the search service, Walters said, “people are at least as interested in group sex and orgies as they are in apple pie.”

But Guhn basically took that gun out of Walters’ hand when he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four years.