ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, March 30, 1996 TAG: 9604010026
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: PORTSMOUTH
SOURCE: Associated Press
A PORTSMOUTH JUDGE cited a need to see the site where a track coach allegedly videotaped girls undressing.
A judge visited a h igh school locker room Friday where a track coach allegedly videotaped girls while they were undressing.
``I'd like to go down there and see where this was done,'' Circuit Judge Norman Olitsky told prosecutors and defense attorneys in the case of John W. Crute. ``I want to see how this occurred.''
Crute, 45, faces 18 felony charges of producing sexually explicit videotapes of minors. He also faces four misdemeanor charges of unlawfully filming a minor under certain circumstances.
At a daylong motions hearing that originally was scheduled for Crute's trial, Olitsky dismissed 20 misdemeanor counts when Commonwealth's Attorney Martin Bullock acknowledged the alleged offenses occurred before July 1994, the date that the law banning such filming took effect.
S. Earl Griffin, Crute's attorney, sought the dismissal of all the charges. He said Crute's indictment last Oct. 5 on the other misdemeanors came after the one-year statute of limitations for such charges.
Griffin also argued the law was intended to address the exploitation of children and did not apply merely to nude girls who were being filmed without their knowledge.
``This is not sexually explicit visual material because it is not a lewd display of nudity,'' he said.
Crute was arrested last July after an employee at Woodrow Wilson High School found a video camera in a closet next to the girls' locker room. Crute was suspended from his job after his arrest pending resolution of the case.
In a search of Crute's home, police confiscated 400 videotapes, but Bullock submitted only 25 of them into evidence.
The judge, Bullock and Griffin watched portions of three of the tapes in court Friday on a monitor that was turned so that others in the courtroom, including some alleged victims and their families, could not see it.
Bullock said Crute set up the recordings to give the best view of the girls' breasts and genitals.
Olitsky and the attorneys spent about 15 minutes inside the school.
The judge said he plans to view all 25 tapes next week. He said he would issue a ruling on the dismissal motions in two to three weeks.
LENGTH: Medium: 51 linesby CNB