Backpage website tries to have pimping charges dropped

Carl Ferrer was arrested in Houston on a California warrant after he arrived on a flight from Amsterdam

Charges of pimping made against the boss of personal ads website Backpage should be thrown out, his lawyers say

Carl Ferrer was arrested following an investigation, which concluded that "many" of the site's adult escort adverts involved prostitutes and victims of sex trafficking.

His lawyers argue that ads posted on the site are protected by free speech rules.

The California Attorney General says the site is an "online brothel".

Former Backpage owners Michael Lacey and James Larkin were also charged with conspiracy to commit pimping and questioned for four days. All have now been released on bail, pending a hearing on 16 November.

In a letter to the Attorney General Kamala Harris, the lawyers request that the complaints against all three be withdrawn.

"The state cannot prosecute a publisher for publishing speech with absolutely no showing that the speech was unlawful, much less any allegation that defendants ever even saw the specific ads that are the basis for its case," the lawyers wrote.

"As the Supreme Court has long recognised, states cannot punish parties that publish or distribute speech without proving they had knowledge of illegality, as any other rule would severely chill speech."

'Online brothel'

Attorney General Kamala Harris seems determined to pursue the charges and reiterated a previous statement: "Raking in million of dollars from the trafficking and exploitation of vulnerable victims is outrageous, despicable and illegal.

"Backpage and its executive purposefully and unlawfully designed Backpage to be the world's top online brothel."

The website is the second largest online classified ad service in the US, after Craigslist, and has faced scrutiny from the US Senate as well as civil lawsuits over allegations that it facilitates sex trafficking.

A case involving the alleged trafficking of children in Massachusetts was thrown out by a federal appeals court, which said that the free speech principles embodied in the Communications Decency Act "were paramount".

The Communications Decency Act was an attempt to regulate pornographic material on the internet but includes a section that states that online publishers cannot be held legally responsible for what others say and do.