SANDYS PARISH, BERMUDA – In defending his client this week, a man named Anthony Adcock who admitted to importing 108 pornographic DVDs in January, former Cabinet Secretary-turned-attorney Leo Mills appealed to a Magistrates’ Court not for mercy, but for reason.According to Bermuda-based newspaper The Royal Gazette, Mills held aloft a copy of Players Nasty as he addressed the court, and said: “If you can walk into a legitimate business place and purchase this kind of material, then it does not seem to me entirely appropriate that someone who imports this same kind of material exposes themselves to prosecution when you can buy the same kind of material without any difficulty at all.”
“Quite honestly,” added Mills “in this day and age it really is a disgrace that a man would be brought before the court for such an offence.”
Mills does not dispute that Adcock imported the DVDs, accepting a package delivered via FedEx on January 24th of this year. Adcock also admitted to importing similar DVDs for resale, previously.
Mills did contend, however, that the ready availability of similar content in Bermuda, through a variety of other means, should at least argue for a lesser penalty for his client. Mills asked the court to impose a small fine of $100, rather than the maximum penalty of $5,000 plus jail time. Adcock was ultimately fined $1000 by the court for his offense.
According to the Royal Gazette, Crown Counsel Cindy Clarke submitted a request to have the DVDs destroyed. In response, Magistrate Khamisi Tokunbo ordered Clarke to bring the DVDs to an August 22nd court date, where the prosecution will have to demonstrate that the DVDs are “obscene” before the videos can be destroyed or permanently confiscated.
Although his argument in this case served the purpose of securing a reduced penalty for his client, Mills clearly takes issue with Bermuda’s obscenity statute, itself.
“The point that I was trying to convey to the court was that there already exists those types of films on internet and through satellite and in movie stores,” Mills said. “It just seems kind of ludicrous when other entities are essentially selling the same material,” material which those other entities would also have to import, Mills notes.
Mills also wondered aloud about the implications of his client’s case on business that sell adult materials, asking “if he [Adcock] as a member of the public faces a criminal charge for importing those types of materials, what then happens when a business has those types of materials? Like the judge said there is hypocrisy in many areas of the community which needs to be addressed.”
