PHOENIX — In a procedural win for the former owners of adult classifieds website Backpage.com, a two-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered federal prosecutors to address the defense’s request for the judge overseeing the criminal trial to remove herself from it.
Yesterday, Chief Judge Sidney Thomas and Judge Andrew Hurwitz filed an order upholding the petition for a ’writ of mandamus’ presented by the defense of Michael Lacey and James Larkin, former owners of Backpage.
Lacey and Larkin filed a petition with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals last month seeking an order to recuse the U.S. District Court in Arizona Judge Susan Brnovich.
In late September, as XBIZ reported, the defense requested that Brnovich recuse herself over public statements made by her husband, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a vocal activist against what he calls “human trafficking,” which includes a lurid pamphlet published by his office.
A month later, Judge Brnovich issued a ruling detailing her refusal to recuse herself from the case, denying the defendants' contention that evidence of her husband’s explicit activism against them as part of a crusade alleging “human trafficking” resulted in a conflict of interest and cast doubts on her impartiality.
Yesterday’s development was first reported by news site FrontPageConfidential.com, which is published by Lacey and Larkin and edited by Stephen Lemons, and is the last journalistic remnant of their once-powerful company, Village Voice Media.
Judge: The Backpage Case 'Is Not About Backpage'
Last Friday, Brnovich held a hearing and refused to grant the defense a stay until the Appeals decision had been reached.
During that hearing, held over the phone, Brnovich once again repeated that the prejudicial comments made by her husband about Backpage were not grounds for her to recuse herself over the conflict of interest.
“This case is not about Backpage,” she reportedly said during the hearing.
As FrontPageConfidential noted, this is “an assertion that might come as a surprise for anyone familiar with the federal government’s superseding indictment in the case, which mentions Backpage more than 600 times.”
“I do not understand the distinction she’s making between the defendants and Backpage,” Lacey told FrontPageConfidential. “It seems as if, for the purposes of the prosecution, they are one and the same."
Mark Brnovich's Pamphlet
Lacey and Larkin have produced copies of AG Mark Brnovich’s tawdry “anti-trafficking” pamphlet “Human Trafficking: Arizona’s Not Buying It,” which features a cover portraying a stock photo of a very young woman wearing a skimpy top and leaning into the window of a car.
The sensationalistic 2017 pamphlet, still available as a government publication, wildly exaggerates the prevalence of what it calls “human trafficking” in Arizona, illustrates it with stock photography of young cis white women in peril that do not match any known statistics about actual human trafficking and repeatedly mentions Backpage — at the time of publication not yet shuttered by the FBI — as engaging in and central to “human trafficking.”
The pamphlet is so much presented as the thoughts of AG Brnovich that it even begins with an introduction titled “Letter From Mark” (sic) where the public servant — and husband of the federal judge in charge of Backpage’s prosecution — takes full ownership of the alarmist statements that follow.
For more of XBIZ's coverage of the Backpage trial, click here.
Main Image: The Brnovichs, Arizona's legal power couple.