Shortly before midnight, The Pensacola News Journal reported that Guhn and his associates, all principals with the Cash Titans program, pleaded guilty to various charges – but not obscenity. According to the article, Guhn will be sentenced to three to five years in state prison.
Cash Titans general manager Andrew Craft, and Guhn partner Kevin Stevens, pleaded guilty to one count of racketeering and are facing two to four years in prison. Another defendant, Thomas Dwyer, pleaded guilty to wholesale promotion of obscene materials.
All remain free on bond before sentencing on Aug. 11.
Global Technologies Inc., doing business as Ray Guhn Productions and Cash Titans, made $10 million in its first five years, prosecutors alleged, while it shot adult Internet content in homes, at hotels, along the interstate and in public in Pensacola and Pace, Fla.
Guhn was initially charged by Escambia County prosecutors in June 2006 with racketeering, enterprise prostitution and the production and sale of obscene material. Escambia County then dropped the charges before refilling the racketeering and money laundering charges in neighboring Santa Rosa County in July 2007.
"We have this [porn] problem statewide,” Assistant State Attorney Russ Edgar, who prosecuted the case, told the Pensacola News Journal. “I hope prosecutors will take our lead and enforce our law.”
Guhn’s lawyer Lawrence Walters was quoted in the New York Times earlier yesterday for employing a novel defense strategy. In regards to the community standards prong of the Miller test, Walters sought to use Google Trends search data of Pensacola residents to buoy his claim that local community members have an active interest in sexual content.
Judge Ron Swanson ruled that the community in this case was defined as the counties that make up Florida’s First Circuit Court: Escambia, Santa Rosa, Okaloosa and Walton.
“Time and time again you’ll have jurors sitting on a jury panel who will condemn material that they routinely consume in private,” Walters told the Times. “Utilizing search queries] we can show how people really think and feel and act in their own homes, which, parenthetically, is where this material was intended to be viewed.”
By pleading guilty to racketeering, Guhn avoided an obscenity trial.
Walters was unavailable for comment at press time.
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