Washington (CNN) – The criminal conviction of a sex trafficker known as the “S&M Svengali” was reinstated by the Supreme Court on Monday.
The case gave the justices a rare visit to the shadowy world of sadomasochism and sex slavery.
The high court by a 7-1 vote allowed the original conviction of Glenn Marcus to stand. He had been sentenced to nine years in prison for the sexual abuse, physical mutilation, and psychological humiliation of a woman who had agreed to be photographed as his “sex slave.”
A federal appeals court in New York had dismissed the entire conviction, saying some of the offenses occurred before the 2000 Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which was used to prosecute Marcus.
But Justice Stephen Breyer said the procedural violations in this case were not so severe to justify throwing out the entire case, since some of the offenses clearly occurred after the law was passed.
“Given the tiny risk that the jury would have based its conviction upon those few pre-enactment days alone,” said Breyer, “a refusal to recognize such an error as a ‘plain error’; [and to set aside the verdict] is most unlikely to cast serious doubt on the fairness, integrity, or public reputation of the judicial system.”
Establishing a clear standard for “plain error” review when setting aside convictions has been a particularly tricky area of law for the Supreme Court in recent years.
Link
See also:
Second Circuit’s “plain error†standard struck down in Marcus (SCOTUSblog)
United States v. Marcus (08-1341) (Legal Information Institute)
ABA: U.S. Supreme Court Update (Criminal Law Library Blog)
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