|
|||||||||||||
Printer-Friendly
Email this Story
Post a Comment (0)
Attorney seeks to disqualify commonwealth's attorney's office
The attorney for a Freedom High School assistant principal charged in August for possession of child pornography is trying to get the Loudoun County Commonwealth's Attorney's Office disqualified from the case.
Steven D. Stone filed a motion to disqualify, claiming bias on the part of Loudoun County Commonwealth's Attorney Jim Plowman.
Stone's client, Ting-Yi Oei, 59, of Reston, was charged with possession of child pornography for holding evidence of an inappropriate cell-phone photo of a female Freedom student who is a juvenile.
Oei was originally charged with failure to report child abuse or neglect, but that was dropped in July before he was indicted in August on the child pornography charge.
In an affidavit Stone filed in court, James Faughnan, the attorney who represented Oei in the failure to report case, wrote that in a phone conversation he had with Plowman, Plowman “acknowledged that the photo was not true porn.”
Stone filed the motion to disqualify claiming bias since Plowman went ahead with child pornography charges even though he had said it was not child pornography.
Wittmann contested that part of the affidavit, saying that Plowman did not say it wasn't child porn but that it was “not the typical type of child porn [his office] deals with.”
Loudoun County Circuit Court Judge Thomas D. Horne declined to hear the motion since Plowman and Wittmann try cases in his court so often.
“I'm not going to judge the credibility of these persons,” Horne said.
Instead, Horne will forward the matter to the Virginia Supreme Court to appoint a resident judge. The new judge should rule on the motion by mid-November, Horne said.
If the judge rules in favor of Stone, new prosecution will have to be appointed to the case before it goes to trial before Horne Feb. 26, 2009. If the judge does not rule in favor of Stone, Plowman and Wittmann will stay on the case when it goes to trial.
Oei apparently confiscated the photo in question from another student at the school March 14, but never informed the child’s parents, the Loudoun Sheriff’s Office school resource deputy assigned to the school or Child Protective Services, as required by law, Loudoun County Sheriff's Office spokesman Kraig Troxell said.
You must be logged in to post a comment.