SJC takes up case questioning what defines a pimp

Who’s a pimp? How should prosecutors jail them?

Those questions are front-and-center in a case the Supreme Judicial Court plucked for special review stemming from a 2012 nationwide prostitution sting that led to Jonathan Brown, a 21-year-old from Mattapan, being hit with human trafficking and pimping charges.

Cops found Brown in a car with a prostitute who had just met an undercover cop at a Holiday Inn in Saugus, and they found the $250 paid to the woman in Brown’s sneaker.

That meager evidence — as an appeals court later called it — led to a jury convicting Brown on one count of the state’s pimping law. But Brown contends the law he was convicted under is unconstitutionally vague, in short, because under the law anyone taking money from someone they know is a prostitute could be swept up on pimping charges.

“A prostitute couldn’t help her elderly mother out with rent,” Brown’s attorney David M. Osborne told the Herald. “That is not the case here, but that is the kind of problem that arises if you strictly interpret the statute.”

Osborne said the challenge to the pimping law isn’t meant to open the floodgates for prostitution as much as it seeks to tweak an issue with the law.

“It’s not that everything should be legal. It has nothing to do with that,” he said. “There’s so much conduct that can be swept up under the statute. It’s always been viewed as a statute that gets at pimping, but that relies on the police and the prosecutors and the court to do the right thing. There are grey areas where someone appears to be pimping but is not, or less-than-innocent conduct, but it’s not pimping.”

Osborne is arguing the SJC should rule that prosecutors need to prove that alleged pimps had arranged the meeting between a customer and the prostitute.

Dismissing a request from Brown’s trial lawyer that the judge honor a 1989 appeals court ruling requiring prosecutors to prove that element, the judge said it wouldn’t fly in his court and he’d need to hear from the high court.

“It was an invitation,” Osborne said, days after the SJC agreed to take the case. “The judge is prophetic.”

Osborne also says the pimping law needs to require proof the defendant knew the money or support he received came not only from a person known to be a prostitute but also that the money was made in the act of prostitution.

A spokeswoman for the Essex District Attorney’s office, which prosecuted Brown, declined to comment on the SJC taking the case and said it had until July 5 to file its argument in the case.