The trial of Sean Combs ended this summer with the music mogul brought to his knees by emotion after he avoided the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison.
But he was not a free man.
Though the jury had cleared him of charges that he forcibly sex trafficked his girlfriends and ran a racketeering conspiracy, it found him guilty of two lesser counts related to elaborate voyeuristic sex marathons at the heart of the case.
Those convictions are based on a federal law known as the Mann Act, which since 1910 has made it a federal offense to transport people across state lines for the purposes of prostitution.
Once treated as something of a side issue in a case built on some of the most serious criminal statutes on the books, the Mann Act charges are now the main battleground for the continuing legal fight over Mr. Combs’s fate as his Oct. 3 sentencing nears.
For prosecutors, the law represents the last opportunity to salvage significant prison time for a man that they portrayed not as some regular customer of prostitutes, but the violent abuser of women, who orchestrated the sex acts.
For Mr. Combs’s lawyers, the convictions — based on a law originally enacted as the White Slave Traffic Act — are all that is left of what they have characterized as an overreaching prosecution that sought to criminalize kinky but consensual sexual activity.
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The post Combs Sentencing Focuses Attention on Prostitution Law From 1910 appeared first on New York Times.
