Suit challenges sex offender law

The obscenity provision is a major flaw, the attorney said.

CINCINNATI (AP) — Any store clerk who sells books, magazines and videos that are later considered obscene is in jeopardy of being forced to register as a sex offender, an attorney who filed a lawsuit challenging a new state law said Tuesday.

Ohio’s sex offender law, which took effect in January and increases the length of time convicted sex offenders must register with police, is unconstitutional because it contains a provision that for the first time applies to people convicted of pandering obscenity, said attorney Louis Sirkin.

Sirkin represents a woman — identified in the lawsuit as G.B. — who works as a manager at the city’s Hustler Hollywood store, which sells sexually explicit DVDs and adult magazines. Because of the subjective and ever-evolving definition of obscenity, the woman fears she could be prosecuted for pandering obscenity and, if convicted, forced to register as a sex offender, he said.

“Everyone who sells media material, whether it’s a clerk at a Barnes Noble or a clerk at an adult video store, should be concerned about this,” Sirkin said. The lawsuit, filed last week in U.S. District Court, asks a judge to strike down the law’s obscenity provision on the basis that it violates rights to due process and free speech.

“We are prepared to defend the constitutionality of the law,” said Jim Gravelle, a spokesman for the Ohio attorney general’s office, which is named as a defendant.

Gravelle declined to comment further, saying he hadn’t seen a copy of the lawsuit.

The Hustler manager has worked at the store since 2006. Being forced to register as a sex offender would devastate her children and likely cause them to be kicked out of their Catholic school because it requires background checks, the lawsuit said.

“If prosecutors could go after someone like her, imagine the chilling effect this law could have on movie theaters or museums that display something later deemed obscene,” Sirkin said. “I don’t think that was the purpose of rewriting the sex offender law.”

In 1990, the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati and its director were charged with obscenity for exhibiting photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, a controversial American photographer known for his homoerotic images. Both were acquitted, but the case sparked a national debate over using government funds for the arts.

A message seeking comment was left Tuesday with state Sen. Steve Austria, a Republican from suburban Dayton who sponsored the sex offender bill.

The state Legislature passed the law last year to comply with a federal one that requires states to increase sex offender registration requirements by 2009 or lose some federal funding. The federal law is named after Adam Walsh, a 6-year-old Florida boy abducted and killed in 1981.