NEW YORK, NY – Ten years ago the city of New York declared war on its sex shops. Now, thanks to a recent decision by the State Court of Appeals, the city’s public enemy number one is getting a chance to prove that it was misunderstood and has changed its presumably wicked ways.On Thursday, the New York State Court of Appeals reversed a lower court ruling from 2004 that had given the city permission to close adult shops without giving them an opportunity to present their side of the case. Now the entire legal situation goes back to the Supreme Court in Manhattan.
Shop owners insist that they have academic studies that prove that problems the city had complained were lowering property values or causing increases in crime have not existed since they began complying with a 1995 anti-pornography law. The city insists that such is not the case and claims it has data to support its continued hostility toward adult shops. In fact, according to New York City, the shops have never complied with the law, which limited the amount of mature merchandise that could be sold and displayed in some areas of the city to 40-percent of total inventory or floor space. According to the city, in order to give the appearance of compliance, some shops added mainstream books and videos but never changed the actual purpose for their retail outlet’s existence.
Yet Herald Prince Fahringer, an attorney representing several affected stores, says that professors from Columbia University and John Jay College of Criminal Justice are prepared to testify that the city is using outdated data and that the shops are not a blight, as they have been accused of being.
Chief of the appeals division for the city’s Law Department, Leonard Koerner, believes that the court decision is “very unfortunate,” but looks forward to having the issue resolved in court. According to Koerner, the “so-called 60-40 establishments are merely sham adult businesses.” Fahringer disagrees and believes that a day in court will vindicate his clients. “The issue is, are these stores a sham? We have every expectation that we can show they are not. They have changed. Nor only did the configuration of the stores change, but also the whole environment of the stores changed.”
This isn’t the first time that Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s 2001 sweep and, some say, “Disneyfication” of the city made it impossible for some shops to operate in certain areas without changing their inventory. The 1995 60-40 law went into effect in 1998 after a number of court-ordered delays and remains in effect in spite of being declared unconstitutional in 2003 by the state Supreme Court after a group of store owners protested enforcement even after they complied in good faith with the ordinance. That decision was overturned by the Supreme Court Appellate Division and has been in force ever since.
