PHOENIX — Federal prosecutors asked on Monday that the three remaining defendants in the protracted Backpage.com case in Arizona be sentenced to 20 years in prison each.
The federal prosecutors asked for former co-owner Michael Lacey and executives Scott Spear and John Brunst to be sentenced for the few remaining charges that resulted from the controversial, years-spanning prosecutions that resulted in one mistrial for prosecutorial misconduct.
As XBIZ reported, in April U.S. District Judge Diane Humetewa acquitted Lacey and his two co-defendants of most of the counts remaining from the case, launched against the website operators by the Justice Department in 2018.
Judge Humetewa eliminated 63 of the 84 counts remaining after the November verdict by a jury in the first federal retrial of the case, after the initial mistrial.
The retrial jury deadlocked on prostitution-related charges against Lacey, though it found him guilty on one count of international concealment money laundering related to the operation of Backpage. Spear and Brunst were convicted of multiple counts in November.
The case against Backpage — dubbed by politicians from both parties “an online brothel” — was a central issue in the passing of the controversial FOSTA-SESTA legislation.
“Essentially, the feds want Lacey, a longtime free speech advocate, to die in prison,” Arizona journalist Stephen Lemons, the foremost authority on the case, wrote for Front Page Confidential, a Lacey-aligned online publication, at the time. “They’ve already caused the death of Jim Larkin, Lacey’s longtime business partner, fellow newspaperman and co-defendant in the Backpage case.”
Larkin committed suicide in July 2023. He was reportedly exhausted by the financial burden imposed on his family by the federal authorities’ unusually lengthy and persistent campaign against the creators of Backpage.com.
Prosecutors claimed on Monday through a memo they were “unaware” of any mitigating circumstances.
“Motivated by greed, defendants’ hubris had devastating consequences for countless individuals,” the prosecutors alleged, and went on to mention supposed instances of “child sex trafficking,” which were not part of any of the charges against the Backpage owners and execs.
Similar allegations by federal prosecutors after repeatedly being admonished against it by the judge resulted in the 2021 mistrial.
Lacey, Spear and Brunst all requested probation in their own sentencing memorandums, Law 360 reported, with Lacey alleging that his only felony conviction was for a “financial crime that he purportedly committed upon the idea and advice of two credentialed lawyers, wherein all reporting rules were followed.”
“The government wants this court to believe that Backpage.com is akin to the worst pimp in the nation,” Spear’s memorandum noted. “Mr. Spear and his co-defendants wrongly became the scapegoats in a time of unprecedented hysteria surrounding sex trafficking.”
Sentencing is scheduled for Aug. 27-28.