The prosecution of Peter Dicks, the Sportingbet PLC executive arrested between flights in New York, will be one for the record books.

The State of Louisiana court issued the arrest warrant although it appears that Dicks has never been in that U.S. state.

He is being charged under a 1997 Louisiana law that appears to have been designed to protect the state’s riverboat gambling business.

The Louisiana law forbids most types of Internet gambling. Placing a bet is a crime punishable by a fine of up to $500 and up to six months in jail. However, someone like Dicks who manages a gambling site is subject to a fine of up to $20,000 and up to five years in prison, perhaps at hard labor, according to the law.

The only trouble is that Sportingbet operations are in Costa Rica and other foreign countries. The British company has no presence in Louisiana except that its Internet pages are available there.

Dicks is free in New York on $50,000 bail after a hearing in the state’s Supreme Court, which is a trial court. He is scheduled for another hearing Thursday to consider his transfer to Louisiana, according to his company.

“Neither Mr. Dicks nor the Sportingbet Group has  ever received any previous correspondence from any authority within the State of Louisiana regarding this or any other related matter,” said the company.  “The board believes that Mr. Dicks intends to vigorously contest this request.”

In its description of the law, the State of Louisiana  says: “The legislature further recognizes that it has an obligation and responsibility to protect its citizens, and in particular its youngest citizens, from the pervasive nature of gambling which can occur via the Internet and the use of computers connected to the Internet.”

Dicks’ case is different from that of David Carruthers, the BetonSports executive arrested in July in Texas. Carruthers is facing federal charges that include money laundering. His case is shaky, too, because the U.S. Congress has never prohibited specifically Internet gambling.

However, Carruthers has been an outspoken advocate of Internet gambling and some of his publicity stunts (like putting a mobile home rigged to take bets in the parking lot of the Tampa professional football team) have tweaked a lot of noses.

Louisiana, Nevada, Texas, and Illinois are states featuring large-scale legalized gambling revenue that is placed at risk by allowing new forms of gambling to emerge from the Internet, and these states have recently banned (or introduced legislation banning) Internet gambling explicitly, according to I. Nelson Rose, a professor of Law, Whittier Law School, who published a 1999 treatment of Internet gaming laws.

The professor asks the key question: “But how does one enforce these state laws on the World Wide Web, particularly when dealing with Web sites based out-of-state, or even outside American borders?”

Ironically, the issue may be decided in the New York court system instead of that of Louisiana when a New York judge decides if Dicks will be put into custody and sent to Louisiana.