Previous threads have raised the issue regarding the actual rights of clubs / bouncers / dancers to control picturetaking by club customers. Give this recent case new story a read ...
(snip)"[an attractive young lady named] Lebel was having dinner in Little Italy when someone used a camera phone to take pictures down her shirt. Two weeks later, out at a club, Lebel was approached by a man she did not recognize.
He showed her his cell phone and told her, "This is my favorite picture of you."
Lebel was shocked to see a photo that looked into her shirt, "all the way down to my belly button," she said. "You think where's this going to end up? ... What's this pervert going to do with my picture?"
"You don't have to be wearing anything skimpy for that to happen," Lebel said. "You could be getting out of a cab and you put your leg out — that's a shot right there. It could happen to anybody."
But right now, as the law stands, this type of behavior is not illegal. Lebel had no legal rights to prosecute the man who took her picture. Prosecutors like Anne Leitess in Anne Arundel County are forced to charge these high-tech Peeping Toms with other crimes, such as disorderly conduct.
Leitess said she used disorderly conduct laws to prosecute Ralph G. Bernier, a 46-year-old man who she said adapted a briefcase with a camera and then placed it under the skirts of teenage girls in an Annapolis mall. The girls' boyfriends chased him down and caught him. The ensuing disturbance led to the suspect's conviction on disorderly conduct charges, Leitess said. He was sentenced to probation and community service.
"But for that, I don't think I would have been successful in prosecuting him," Leitess said. "There would have been no crime because there is no crime currently on the books to protect women in public places."
Currently, the law prohibits taking photos of a person without his or her consent in a private place - bedroom, dressing room, tanning booth, bathroom — with prurient intent but gives no protection for public places and does not yet address the Internet.(snip)"
I would remind everyone that, like the Little Italy restaurant or the Annapolis shopping mall, strip clubs are legally considered to be 'public places'.



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Exactly. And I bet you don't even give extras for those fees either.


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