BARTOW, FL – Judge J. Dale Durrance denied requests Monday by webmaster Chris Wilson’s attorneys to postpone their client’s bail revocation hearing until March.According to Durrance, Wilson, who was not in court Monday, must attend the scheduled hearing on Friday. If the judge decides to revoke Wilson’s bail because he has continued to operate his adult website, the webmaster, who has been charged with 301 obscenity violations, will be held in the Polk County Jail. In placed in jail, it’s possible that Wilson could be forced to remain there until his trial, which could be more than a year away.
Although Wilson removed all potentially obscene materials from his website earlier this month, it has continued to remain online and has had new images posted to it, according to the State Attorney’s Office.
Wilson’s attorneys, which include noted adult industry attorney Larry Walters, hope to raise First Amendment, community standards, and obscenity law issues at the bail revocation hearing, but believe they will need more than a half hour in order to do so effectively. According to Derek Brett, one of Wilson’s legal representatives, the team wants to call expert witnesses, including a private investigator and a college professor and ask the judge to consider a number of important issues regarding the case, including whether threats of incarceration in order to force Wilson to stop Web publishing on his site is a prior restraint of free speech, before making a decision about their client’s bail. Additionally, the lawyers question whether or not the State Attorney has the legal authority to regulate conduct which takes place outside of the local circuit boundaries. Brett has stated that his law firm has been unable to find any examples of bail revocation due to continued uploading of Web content.
Assistant State Attorney Brad Copley believes that 30 minutes is an adequate amount of time to file a motion and that the request is an indication that Wilson’s attorneys want a full trail. “The 30-minute time reservation is well within the customary time allotted for such matters in other, more serious cases,” Copley insisted as part of the state’s objection to the continuance request.
Wilson is currently free on $151,000 bail, thanks to a $30,000 payment made by his family to a bail bondsmen after his October 7 arrest.
“It is with some regret that we must inform our users that this website has been forced to remove all sexually explicit content at this time,” read a posting on Chris’s website, NowThatsFuckedUp.com. “The owner of the site is being threatened with jail by Polk County, Florida authorities if any obscene images appear on the site. Since nobody can tell, in advance, whether an image might be found obscene by some judge or jury, we have chosen to remove all explicit content at this time.”
Although a trial date has not been determined, the State Attorney’s Office has requested that Wilson be held in pre-trial detention until trial time. Durrance has not indicated whether or not he will honor defense attorneys’ requests for an extended opportunity to make their case.
