Adult entertainment lawyer Cary S. Wiggins has the boyish looks, good manners and perfectly pressed shirt of someone who was raised right.
Last month Wiggins, 34, succeeded in overturning Georgia's obscenity law, which includes a ban on so-called sex toys.
Wiggins acknowledges not everyone would congratulate themselves on such a feat. He said that when he announced the news to his father, a retired U.S. Air Force pilot, his initial response was, "You're not proud of that, are you?"
Wiggins told his father that he was, explaining he "convinced a panel of three federal judges to see the statute violates one of the public's most cherished rights," namely, free speech -- even though obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment.
The case is This That and the Other Gift v. Cobb County, Ga., No. 04-16419 (11th Cir. Feb. 15, 2006). Circuit judges Susan H. Black, Frank M. Hull and Jerome Farris heard the case.
Wiggins told me the only seriously contested part of the obscenity law, which forbids materials of "prurient interest," is the 1975 ban on sex toys.
The ban became a problem for Wiggins' client, This That and the Other, a Cobb County tobacco and adult novelty shop.
Fortunately for the state's purveyors of sex toys, the law has been spottily enforced. When Cobb licensed This That and the Other for business in 1998, Wiggins said, the county knew the store would be selling sex toys.
But in 2000, the county cracked down and told This That and the Other to stop selling the items.
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