Court Motion Claims Sex Stings Unfairly Target Gays

Warm Sands is a well-known resort neighborhood in Palm Springs catering to the gay community.

It’s also been the backdrop for numerous police sex stings.

Stings carried out in the same area in June and July of 2009 resulted in the arrests of 24 men.

Several of those cases hit the desk of Roger Tansey, a public defender in Indio, who claims the stings are discriminatory and he wants the charges dropped.

“When you first look at these cases, it looks like they’re all about sex and frankly, they’re really not,” said Tansey. “There’s a deeper principle here. Are the laws in Palm Springs going to be enforced fairly and without discrimination?”

Tansey’s office filed a motion accusing the Palm Springs Police Department of targeting gay men and making a backroom deal with the Riverside County District Attorney’s office before the stings even happened, to assure that only guilty pleas to severe charges would be accepted.

One of the key numbers in this motion is “314.” Tansey says sex sting cases typically are settled with a misdemeanor including a fine and probation. But in these cases, the police and the D.A.’s office were going for Penal Code section 314 violations, which included the defendants having to register as sex offenders for life.

“The offers we have gotten are plead to the 314, you’re a lifetime sex offender, no negotiation,” said Tansey.

Thomas Hughes worked as a Deputy District Attorney in Indio from 2007 to 2009. He says he handled a few sex sting cases in the valley directed at men having sex with men. He says any 314 charges in those cases would be unusual.

“I’ve never seen it before. I followed two other stings prior to this one and I never saw a 314 attached to the sex stings before the Palm Springs one,” said Hughes.

Hughes also believes police and the D.A.’s office struck a deal to treat this group of gay men differently.

“Not allow any plea bargaining to happen, requiring life registration when all the cases are different. Seems and smells like discrimination, especially because it doesn’t happen with other couples who engage in sex or in the past with other stings with homosexual men. First time I’ve ever seen that,” said Hughes.

Tansey says he’s gone over 10 years worth of cases — and found no evidence of Palm Springs Police following up on complaints of heterosexual sex in public.

“If men and women are having public sex in Palm Springs and they’re not being prosecuted and gay men are, the question comes up ‘Why?’ The behavior is equally unlawful, so why is one group being single out and not the other?”

According to court documents, police set up the stings last summer after receiving complaints from residents and resorts in the Warm Sands area about men having sex in public.

But Tansey argues there’s no evidence of those complaints.

Kirby Pruett, manager of Century Resort in the Warm Sands area, says he knows of no complaints that were made to police.

“It may go on, but the neighbors here next to us, ourselves, we’ve never made a complaint and said we need to do something about this,” said Pruett.

“We have the PSPD who had to have expended thousands of dollars pursuing what are really victim-less crimes about which nobody complained,” said Tansey.

The Riverside County District Attorney’s Office released a statement saying: “This is an outrageous and false accusation. This is nothing more than an attempt by a defense attorney to have the charges against the defendant dropped. The conduct by those arrested and charged in a sting operation like this one is against the law, plain and simple. This type of conduct is illegal regardless of sexual orientation.”

The Palm Springs Police Department declined to comment for this story.

The motion is set to go before a judge in Indio on June 14.