Former Cabinet Secretary Leo Mills, now a lawyer in private practice, rallied to the defense of Anthony Adcock, who admitted to ordering 108 pornographic DVDs via Fed Ex in late January from Playtime Cinema.
Mills, who addressed the court while waving a magazine called “Players Nasty,” argued that the country’s obscenity laws are applied inconsistently.
“If you can walk into a legitimate business place and purchase this kind of material —vibrators or magazines — 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,” Mills said.
Mills, who asked the court to levy a $100 fine on Adcock, rather than the maximum $5,000 and possible prison term, won a slight victory with his unorthodox tactics.
Magistrate Khamisi Tokunbo ordered Adcock to pay $1,000, but spared the man prison time.
“The point that I was trying to convey to the court was that there already exist 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.”
The materials came to the attention of authorities during a routine inspection, which yielded the contraband DVDs rather than the declared $1,100 worth of software the customs paperwork indicated to be contained in the parcel.
Tokunbo ordered an Aug. 22 hearing to decide if the seized materials should be classified as obscene. Should the prosecution prevail at that hearing, the DVDs will be destroyed.