STAUNTON, VA — A prosecutor in this Washington D.C. suburb known for its Colonial charm may be getting more than he bargained for in a series of obscenity trials scheduled to begin June 17th. Paul Cambria and Louis Sirkin — both high-powered, high-profile First Amendment attorneys — are representing the defendants.Manassas, VA-based businessman Rick Krial, owner of After Hours Video in Staunton, and Tinsley W. Embrey, a clerk at the store, were indicted on 22 misdemeanor and felony obscenity counts related to the sale of 12 videos shortly after the store opened in October 2007. Cambria will represent Krial, and Sirkin will represent Embrey.
Commonwealth Attorney Ray Robertson, who is heading the prosecution, said he isn’t worried about facing two of the adult industry’s biggest legal guns, even though both men have mounted successful obscenity defenses for Larry Flynt and others over more than three decades. In fact, Robertson seemed almost cocky in recent remarks to the The News Virginian.
“I think it’s no accident that they’ve [the adult industry] sent in their A-team,” he told the newspaper. “The fact that [Cambria and Sirkin] would deign to come to little old Staunton, VA, means they must be worried about something.”
Not so, according to Cambria, who told the paper, “Every time a government official tries to interfere with an adult’s choice of entertainment, that is a national issue.”
Sirkin told reporters, “I hope jurors remember that Virginia was one of the original 13 colonies, and the importance of the American way, and the liberties people came here for in the first place.”
Because the videos were obtained in four separate transactions with undercover police officers, the grand jury handed down four separate indictments. Robertson said he intends to prosecute Krial and Embrey in four separate trials, starting in June with the four misdemeanor charges facing the two men. He said he doesn’t want one jury to experience “porn overload.”
“You’re dealing with 24 hours’ worth of porn,” Robertson told Staunton’s local newspaper, The Hook. “I’ve watched these [videos], and if you require a jury to watch all that, they could become bored or desensitized to these acts.”
He also doesn’t want any jury to see all the videos covered by the relevant indictment. Instead, he proposed to Judge Thomas Wood that the prosecution be allowed to choose two of the movies from the group of 12 to be used at trial as “representative samples” of the material before the court.
“My thoughts are that I would be totally disgusted and sickened and upset with somebody if I were a juror having to watch all this,” he told The Hook. “This way, it’s only four hours, and they’ll definitely get an idea of it.”
As might be imagined, Sirkin and Cambria strenuously objected to that line of thinking. Sirkin called it unconstitutional.
“Each of these movies is presumed not to be obscene,” Sirkin told the court. “We’re not willing to say if you find two obscene, the other 10 are obscene. You’re taking away that presumption, and that’s a chilling effect. If [the prosecutors] feel it’s a handicap [to show the juries all of the allegedly obscene footage], they chose their own handicap.”
In the meantime, Robertson has admitted to watching all 24 hours of alleged obscenity himself, and he seems to take no end of delight in repeatedly describing it in graphic terms for the media. On separate occasions, he has described the content as “double penetrating women, slamming them in both orifices, multiple strangers ejaculating on the faces of women” and “one guy inserting his penis into a woman’s vagina, and another guy inserting his penis into her anus, and then that guy puts it in her mouth, again, and again, and again.”
Krial and Embrey are not the only ones calling in heavy hitters for their team. Robertson has a big gun on his side, as well: Matthew Buzzelli, a member of the federal Obscenity Prosecution Task Force, is on loan to the Staunton prosecutor’s office from the U.S. Department of Justice. Although federal authorities have no jurisdiction in the case, Buzzelli said the DOJ took an interest because of the trial’s relative proximity to Washington D.C.
Sirkin said he’s seen a federal prosecutor involved in a local obscenity trial only once or twice in his career and wondered if the DOJ wasn’t getting involved because of his presence and Cambria’s.
“I find there are much more important problems, like how people from the White House won’t testify before Congress,” he told The Hook. “But here they are worried about the sale of videos to consenting adults.”
