{"id":45673,"date":"1999-02-26T00:00:00","date_gmt":"1999-02-26T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/945e2097-1dfb-11e4-aedf-250bc8c9958e"},"modified":"1999-02-26T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"1999-02-26T00:00:00","slug":"945e20a7-1dfb-11e4-aedf-250bc8c9958e","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/945e20a7-1dfb-11e4-aedf-250bc8c9958e\/","title":{"rendered":"Legal challenge to prostitution law thrown out"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A Superior Court decision penned by Associate Judge Timothy Bellas finds section 4 of Public Law 11-19 is not intended to prohibit constitutionally protected conduct or speech.<\/p>\n<p>The court then denied the motion to dismiss an earlier case which contended the law as unconstitutional and vague.<\/p>\n<p>Defendant Liang Zheng, who was arrested and charged with prostitution loitering, questioned the law and asked the court to dismiss his case.<\/p>\n<p>The decision denying his motion said section 4 prohibits an individual from loitering in a public place.  In addition, it carries the criminal intent to solicit, induce, entice or procure another to commit prostitution.<\/p>\n<p>Zheng and his companion were being watched by police officers last December at the western section of Garapan pursuant to &#8220;Operation Red Light&#8221;.  The officers saw the defendant approaching Asian pedestrians.  He was then arrested and charged with prostitution loitering under P.L. 11-19.<\/p>\n<p>According to the court, this element of specific criminal intent saves section 4 from being unconstitutional. The court added that persons of ordinary intelligence would readily understand what illegal conduct is as prohibited by section 4.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A Superior Court decision penned by Associate Judge Timothy Bellas finds section 4 of Public Law 11-19 is not intended to prohibit constitutionally protected conduct or speech.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45673"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45673\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}