Litigation
Aug. 7, 2002
'More Skin' Request of Dancer Isn't Entrapment, Court Rules
LOS ANGELES - Asking an exotic dancer at a strip club to show "more skin" is not entrapment, a state appellate court has ruled. An undercover officer at Dream Girls in San Diego was treated to views of a dancer's vagina, anus and breasts after he asked if his second $10 dollar "couch dance" would include "more skin."
An undercover officer at Dream Girls in San Diego was treated to views of a dancer's vagina, anus and breasts after he asked if his second $10 dollar "couch dance" would include "more skin."
Because the dancer bared more than allowable in exotic dancing clubs that sell booze, the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control decided to suspend Dream Girls' liquor license for 30 days.
Dream Girls appealed the decision to the Alcoholic Beverage Control Appeals Board of California, which threw out the suspension. The appeals board said that San Diego Police Department Detective Kenneth Nelson's request for more skin had unfairly enticed the dancer into breaking the law.
But the 4th District Court of Appeal disagreed. The three-judge appellate panel compared the situation of an undercover detective in a nudie bar to that of an undercover officer who, trying to catch narcotics dealers, asks a likely suspect to sell him drugs. Dept. of Alcoholic Beverage Control v. Alcoholic Beverage Appeals Board of California, 2002 DJDAR 8779 (Cal. App. 4th Dist. Aug. 2, 2002).
"Such a request has been uniformly held to be a permissible police stratagem absent additional overbearing conduct or pressure by the officer," Justice James A. McIntyre wrote in the seven-page published opinion.
The detective showed up at Dream Girls around midnight one day in March 2000 to do an undercover inspection. He sat at a table, ordered a beer and watched one of the dancers, Mary Diann Gast, go through two routines on stage, according to the opinion. After the dancer finished and sat down at the bar, the detective came up to her and asked for a personal one-on-one dance, known as a "couch dance."
The dancer gave him one dance and asked if he wanted another. The detective answered by asking if there would be "more skin" during the second dance. The dancer not only flashed some additional naked body parts but rubbed her breasts up against the detective, another regulatory violation. Nevertheless, the officer paid her the same $10 "couch dance" charge.
Even if the dancer had hoped the officer would pay her more for the illegal dance, the financial incentive didn't make the undercover cop's request "anything more than the opportunity for Gast [the dancer] to act on her financial motivation by committing the regulatory violation," the three-justice panel said. Justice McIntyre was joined by Justices Judith L. Haller and Alex C. McDonald.
"In almost all of these cases, when a person alleges entrapment for illegal behavior, money's changing hands," said Deputy Attorney General David M. Tiede, who worked on the case.
The attorney for Dream Girls, William Winship Jr., declined to comment.
The dancer had been sent home from Dream Girls for "pushing the rules" six months before her run-in with the undercover police officer. She no longer works for the club, according to the opinion.
The appellate panel sent the case back to the alcohol board for further review. Dream Girls' liquor suspension has been on hold since the club appealed.
Katherine Gaidos
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