Billings Gazette Man Charged Again in Billings Prostitution Sting
(Montana Complimentary Press) Montana's prostitution statutes do not criminalize the ownership or selling of non-penetrative sex. That means the land's "illicit massage parlors," every bit they're referred to past law enforcement, weren't breaking the police if workers provided sexual action that didn't involve penetration.
Senate Pecker 147, which has passed the Senate and House and awaits action by Gov. Steve Bullock, aims to change that by broadening the police to include "sexual contact that is straight and not through wear" to the already prohibited exchange of sexual intercourse.
At to the lowest degree xiii of the land'south approximately twenty such parlors are in Billings, co-ordinate to concern listings referenced in bill testimony. Sen. Margie MacDonald, D-Billings, introduced SB 147 — which expands the definitions of and penalties for trafficking in add-on to expanding the definition of prostitution — after being approached by Yellowstone County Area Human Trafficking Task Force cofounders Penny Ronning, a Billings city councilperson, and Stephanie Baucus, a Billings attorney, with concerns that the businesses could be fronts for trafficking.
Rep. Daniel Zolnikov, R-Billings, has introduced House Bill 749, which would require massage businesses to display therapists' licenses, allow officials to interrupt therapy sessions of two hours or longer, and allocate more than $500,000 for the biennium to hire two defended trafficking investigators in the Division of Criminal Investigation. HB 749 has passed the House and is scheduled for a third Senate reading on Wed.
Earlier in the session, country representative and 2020 candidate for chaser general Kimberly Dudik, D-Missoula, introduced a since-tabled bill that would have added "assisted masturbation" to the land'south list of commercially prohibited activities. She'd been approached more than than a yr earlier by Missoula Police Detective Guy Baker, who had discovered that Missoula police couldn't bring prostitution charges confronting a woman whose neighbors complained that she was seeing clients in an flat complex because they suspected she was merely providing legal handjobs.
Baker has worked both state and federal trafficking cases in partnership with diverse task forces. He supported Dudik'south successful push in 2015 to pass House Bill 89, which established the country'southward trafficking laws.
"If nosotros get information right now that someone … was giving massages with a happy catastrophe, a handjob, you couldn't investigate that farther, because that's not a criminal act right at present," Baker said the week before SB 147 was passed.
The lack of a law against assisted masturbation did not cease a federal investigation from resulting in the indictment of a Billings-area spa possessor, Scot Donald Petrie, on prostitution-related charges, as reported on Tuesday by the Billings Gazette. Details of the investigation take not yet been released, but the indictment alleges that Petrie "developed a scheme and enticed and encouraged individuals to travel from outside the Country of Montana to Montana for the purpose of commercial sexual activity." The counts specifically allege that Petrie violated Montana country laws prohibiting prostitution in their existing form.
Forcing someone to work and forcing someone to engage in sex activity are both crimes under Montana's existing human trafficking and sexual set on laws, merely changing state law so that all possible commercial sexual practice acts are criminalized volition make it easier for police enforcement to investigate the parlors, Baker says. He has also said, along with MacDonald, Zolnikov, and the members of the Yellowstone County job force, that the goal is to prosecute traffickers, not further criminalize people selling sexual practice.
During SB 147'south first hearing, representatives from the ACLU of Montana and the Montana Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence presented concerns to the committee.
"We opposed expanding the definition of prostitution considering it would farther criminalize victims of trafficking and sex activity workers," said ACLU of Montana Advocacy and Policy Managing director SK Rossi.
Both organizations are satisfied with the current version of SB 147, and MacDonald said she agreed with the groups' concerns.
"We're not trying to create additional types of prostitution, so we are trying to be very careful virtually the amendments that we make so we're not basically criminalizing and perhaps victimizing even more than women," she said in February.
The resulting changes, which make buying assisted masturbation, but not selling information technology, a offense, are an endeavor to criminalize only one side of an illegal transaction. How that might piece of work in practice volition be seen after the law goes into effect.
The relevant change to Montana's prostitution law is the addition of "sexual contact that is direct and not through clothing" to the roster of prohibited activeness. A qualification designed to avoid further criminalizing people who sell sexual activity reads: "a prostitute may exist convicted of prostitution but if the prostitute engages in or agrees or offers to engage in sexual intercourse with another person for compensation."
Under SB 147, a person offering the sale of a non-penetrative sex act would be committing the crime of prostitution, just could not exist convicted of prostitution unless they offered sexual intercourse. Whether such a person could be arrested is not clear. A client for such a service, however, could be arrested, Baker said.
"By including a handjob in commercial sex, and then y'all would have the reasonable suspicion to believe that a crime is being, is about to be, or was committed, which gives the police the right to conduct an investigative cease or an investigation on a person" who had patronized a parlor.
Baker referred the question of how prosecutions might work under the new law to Stephanie Baucus, who served on a trafficking job force in the Washington, D.C. area while working for the U.South. Section of Justice from 2009 to 2010. She is married to Banana U.S. Chaser Zeno Baucus, who has prosecuted federal trafficking cases out of Billings. Both Bakery and MacDonald said Stephanie Baucus was instrumental in crafting the nib.
Baucus said the question would be upwards to a prosecutor to fully explain, merely said that, to her understanding, the new police force's establishment of a criminal offense would allow for further investigation of a suspected trafficking situation. For example, if an hush-hush officer investigating a massage parlor were offered an illegal service while posing as a client, that would give police force enforcement grounds to go on with an investigation.
"While the person offering [the service] couldn't exist bedevilled of prostitution, the crime would still be committed." Baucus wrote in an electronic mail. "And so that would likely give [police] the probable crusade they need."
In practice, anti-trafficking operations targeting massage parlors oftentimes lead to the arrests of workers. The contempo Florida parlor raids that yielded the arrest of New England Patriots possessor Robert Kraft have failed to yield trafficking charges, and if the sexual activity workers are convicted on prostitution charges, they may be deported. That's one reason Rep. Jade Bahr, D-Billings, whose commune includes two parlors, said she voted no on SB 147.
"Many [people] in massage can also be immigrants looking for a path to citizenship. What sort of avenues for freedom from trafficking are we offering them besides the threat of deportation?" Bahr wrote in an e-mail. "We should decriminalize sexual activity work, requite workers protections and make it safe for people to come forward if they are existence abused. Some don't come forward because of the fear of being prosecuted and persecuted for what they've done with patrons whether by choice or not."
The push to increase penalties and broaden definitions in Montana comes at a time when other state legislatures, including those in Utah and Oregon, are passing bills that grant immunity from prostitution charges if a victim reports an assault by a client or a robbery that occurred while she was engaged in prostitution.
Bahr'south concerns are similar to those expressed by advocacy groups for Asian massage workers.
"The understandable fear of constabulary leads to hiding, greater vulnerability and risk-taking, and a climate of desperation and panic, which makes workers more vulnerable to exploitative conditions," wrote a fellow member of Red Canary Vocal, a New-York based organization for massage workers, in an email to the Montana Free Press. The organization was formed in 2018 after a massage worker in Queens, New York, fell from a window to her expiry during a police raid.
Quantifying trafficking in Montana is difficult. During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing for SB 147, committee fellow member Sen. Jen Gross, D-Billings, asked how many trafficking cases have been recorded in Montana, but no one was able to provide her with an estimate. The Division of Criminal Investigation reported 23 cases in 2018, and counts as a case any tip that requires investigative follow-upwardly. The DCI too listed 34 adults equally "rescued," which includes both potential trafficking victims and people that law enforcement encounters by answering online escort ads.
According to information supplied by the Court Administrator's Office, there have been no convictions on state trafficking charges since the 2015 passage of Montana's trafficking laws. Federal prosecutions have yielded three trafficking convictions in the state, and convictions in three additional prostitution-related cases that the Montana U.Due south. Attorney's Office considers trafficking-related. During that same time flow, at least 7 individuals have been convicted on state charges of promotion of prostitution or aggravated promotion of prostitution that included elements of trafficking such equally force, fraud, compulsion, or underaged victims. No trafficking or prostitution convictions in the concluding iv years accept been continued to massage parlors, according to court records. Representatives of the Billings Police Department and the FBI said no state or federal charges had been connected to the massage parlors since 2012, when a couple who owned two Billings spas were bedevilled on federal charges of coin laundering and interstate promotion of prostitution. The charges confronting Petrie are the first since then.
Two of the seven individuals convicted on country charges since 2015 were women who faced promotion of prostitution charges while at the same time being considered victims in one or more than of the other five cases. One, an 18-yr-old adult female who was considered a victim in trafficking charges against two men that stemmed from a 2015 Not bad Falls bosom, was bedevilled on felony promotion charges because she had been working aslope a 17-year-erstwhile. The other, a 21-year-old arrested along with a 17-year-old during an cyberspace sting in Billings, was offered an affirmative defense — that she was non guilty by reason of being a victim of the trafficker charged with directing the ii women — but refused to say she was a victim and was subsequently convicted and given a suspended judgement. The 17-year-one-time was arrested in Billings and extradited on a warrant for a probation violation to her domicile state of New Mexico, where a run a risk run into between her extradition officer and a trafficking investigator led to trafficking charges against her mother.
Baker said that arrests of victims are a problem that results from a lack of police enforcement preparation.
"If that's happened, that's function of the mentality we're trying to change, that these women in a trafficking state of affairs are victims and they should not be charged," Bakery said. "And then that just is part of the ongoing education of law enforcement and the justice system and prosecutors to sympathize the difference."
The departure is that betwixt a victim and a criminal, which, under the provisions of SB 147, volition all the same exist determined by the discretion of police enforcement, not the law.
Source: https://missoulacurrent.com/government/2019/04/montana-sex-trafficking-2/?print=print
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