STAUNTON, Virginia — Several motions will be heard Wednesday in the city’s obscenity case against After Hours Video, its owner Rick Krial and an employee, including motions to dismiss.
The obscenity case — scheduled for a four-day trial in August — was set in motion in October when undercover agents from the Staunton and Waynesboro police departments, along with plainclothes officers from the Virginia State Police, posed as customers and purchased a number of DVDs from the Springhill Road adult business, which opened in August.
Weeks later, a special Staunton grand jury convened and charged Krial and his company with 16 felonies and eight misdemeanor charges of obscenity.
In January, an employee at After Hours Video also was charged with six felony counts of obscenity.
In late March defense attorneys filed a number of motions, including one to dismiss based on grounds that the charges violate “constitutional due process guarantee.”
Attorneys argued that the courts have recognized a right to sexual privacy under substantive due process, and that the “fundamental right to sexual privacy should encompass the right not only to possess allegedly obscene materials” but a right to sell them as well.
Court records show Staunton Prosecutor Raymond C. Robertson countered that the same arguments were unsuccessfully used in the Third Judicial Circuit (Penn., Delaware and New Jersey) and the United States Supreme Court.
Robertson also argued that users of pornography become “addicted to this kind of thing” and said the social ramifications are evident.
In citing some of the 12 DVDs that were purchased from After Hours Video that depicted sex scenes with multiple partners, Robertson wrote, “There is no pregnancy in pornography and there is no venereal disease. However, those who attempt to model what they see in these films will surely experience, to some degree, unwanted pregnancies and venereal diseases, including AIDS. The core of our social fabric, which revolves around monogamy and family life, becomes shattered by the advocacy of sex with multiple partners … .”
Defense attorneys also asked for a disclosure of the grand jury minutes and requested a dismissal of the case if irregularities occurred. The motion complained that the grand jury only saw snippets of the DVDs in question, and said each DVD should have been shown in its entirety. Robertson said jurors only needed to view enough of each film to reach probable cause for charges.
Defense attorneys — which include Cincinnati’s Louis Sirkin and Buffalo’s Paul Cambria Jr., two nationally renown First Amendment attorneys who have tried numerous high-profile obscenity cases — also don’t want potential jurors to know that a U.S. Department of Justice lawyer is serving as co-counsel with Robertson. The prosecutor labeled the motion “absolutely ludicrous.”
“The Justice Department is involved because they care about the matter,” Robertson wrote in his court filing.
Judge Thomas H. Wood will hear the motions Wednesday in Staunton Circuit Court.