U.S. Supreme Court Ditches Sex Toy Users' Cert Petition (AVN)

Read the full article by Mark Kernes at AVN.com

SANDY SPRINGS, GA—One is tempted to describe the case of Melissa Davenport and Marshall G. Henry v. City of Sandy Springs, GA as one where the only winners are the attorneys—but considering that the primary counsel of record appear to be attorneys from the Stanford Law School Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, there's a good chance that even they're not being paid, much less the petitioners, who sued the city for what are described as "nominal damages," and whose petition for certiorari was just rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Of course, one big winner is Chattanooga, TN attorney Scott D. Bergthold, perhaps the country's foremost sexually-oriented business ordinance writer—he wrote the majority of such ordinances for Sandy Springs shortly after it was incorporated in 2005—and defender, since lots of municipalities (including Sandy Springs) have hired him to defend such ordinances in court. While no figures are available regarding how much Bergthold has earned from writing and defending anti-adult business laws, at minimum, it's in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

One of the ordinances that Bergthold wrote for Sandy Springs was its sexual device ordinance, passed in 2009, which essentially banned the sale of "sexual devices" (aka sex toys) within the city limits. This quickly prompted a lawsuit from the owners of adult clubs/retail outlets Mardi Gras, Flashers and Inserection, and also prompted Davenport and Henry, who used such devices for medical purposes, to enter the case as intervenors, looking for "nominal damages" from the city for the inconvenience it had caused them. The stores were represented by a team of First Amendment attorneys led by Cary S. Wiggins and J. Michael Murray, who took the case from U.S. District Court all the way to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals—and after their loss there, the clubs Mardi Gras and Flashers, as well as toy store Inserection, created their own cert petition to the U.S. Supreme Court.