This has gone on long enough.
State prosecutors need to stop now, admit they were wrong and – along with Vero Beach Police Chief David Currey and Indian River County Sheriff Deryl Loar – apologize to our community for their ill-conceived and recklessly executed investigation of a prostitution ring that operated out of two local massage spas.
The knockout punch to their candid-camera cases was delivered last week, when Florida’s Fourth District Court of Appeal in West Palm Beach upheld the May 2019 decisions of County Court judges David Morgan and Nicole Menz, both of whom ruled that prosecutors could not use as evidence secretly recorded video surveillance of the spas.
That makes five different judges who’ve ruled that Currey’s officers and Loar’s deputies violated constitutional privacy protections while conducting the covert surveillance.
The appeals court unanimously rejected prosecutors’ feeble defense of the police surveillance in a stern, strongly worded opinion in which the three judges described the use of hidden cameras to investigate misdemeanors as “extreme.”
The judges also offered a stinging rebuke of both agencies for failing to minimize the intrusion into the privacy of innocent spa customers – at least four of them were women – in various stages of undress, citing the Vero Beach Police Department’s investigation as the “most egregious example” because its cameras recorded continuously and indiscriminately for 60 days.
“Those innocent clients potentially live with the knowledge that nude videos of themselves are preserved on a server somewhere with unknown accessibility,” Fourth DCA Judge Corey J. Ciklin wrote in the court’s 23-page opinion.
“In our ever-increasingly digital world filled with hackers and the like, such awareness renders the surveillance a particularly severe infringement on privacy,” he added. “We agree with the trial courts that this is unacceptable.”
And indefensible.
The Fourth Amendment is supposed to protect us from “unreasonable searches and seizures” by the government, but, apparently, none of the masterminds running this investigation bothered to read it – not the police who conducted the surveillance or the state prosecutors responsible for making sure the police follow the law.
Our local judges must share in this fiasco, too, for failing to provide police with a list of what’s legal and what isn’t when authorizing the warrants needed to install the covert cameras.
According to the appeals court’s opinion: “The warrants at issue did not set forth any specific written parameters to minimize the recording of innocent massage seekers, and law enforcement did not actually employ sufficient minimization techniques when monitoring the video or deciding what to record.”
As a result, the opinion went on to state, “law enforcement largely failed to take the most reasonable, basic and obvious” minimization precautions.
So, yeah, there’s plenty of blame to go around – and there’s going to be more when people start filing lawsuits against the city and county.
Local attorneys representing many of the men arrested during the February 2019 prostitution stings at the East Spa in downtown Vero Beach and East Sea Spa outside Sebastian say more than a few of their clients are upset over how they’ve been treated.
First, there was that headline-grabbing press conference at the Vero Beach police headquarters, where Currey and Loar tried to sell the spa busts as a victory in the war against human trafficking, effectively linking the alleged johns to a crime no one has proven occurred here.
Then, even after it became obvious to everyone that the cops overplayed their hand with the human-trafficking claim, click-hungry local news outlets – unlike VeroNews.com – continued to post on their websites the mugshots of the 150-plus men arrested during the prostitution sting.
For weeks, these men were digitally paraded through the public square, where they were shamed in their community and held up to ridicule as if they were hardened felons.
And for what? A misdemeanor?
The State Attorney’s Office wasn’t showing them much compassion, either. Prosecutors didn’t offer a diversion option that would free the men from criminal charges if they paid fines and attended classes until county judges suppressed the video evidence, crippling their cases.
The lawsuits are coming.
Local attorney Brad Jefferson, an island resident, said he already has 15 clients – including one of the women getting a legitimate massage – and plans to file in federal court class-action lawsuits against the city and county.
If this gets to court, you’ve got to like the plaintiffs’ chances: The opinions offered by Morgan, Menz and the appeals court judges in their rulings on the videos in the criminal cases detail the ways the police violated the spa customers’ privacy rights.
In the meantime, we’re waiting for the state prosecutors, led by Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody, to make the next move. If they wish to push on, they can file for a rehearing before the appeals court or take their case to the Florida Supreme Court.
“Do you really want to take a misdemeanor case to the Supremes in the middle of a pandemic?” said Vero Beach attorney Andy Metcalf, who represented more than 30 of the men arrested. “Every judge who has heard this case has made essentially the same ruling.”
Prosecutors could try to convict without the videos – that won’t be easy – or they simply could drop the charges against the remaining defendants. We can expect their decision in the next couple of weeks.
There’s no good reason, however, for prosecutors to waste any more of their time and our tax dollars trying to salvage a flawed case that was fueled by delusions of grandeur.
All the police needed to do was raid the spas and shut them down. Instead, they unnecessarily put the health of our community – as well as the women working at those spas – at increased risk while they chased a sexy, tabloid-type felony they couldn’t prove.
So here we are, 18 months later, and too much damage has been done. State prosecutors need to stop.
This has gone on long enough.