The Law Offices of Kathleen Colton, Ltd.
Criminal Defense / P.O. Box 1364 / St. Charles, IL 60174
THROWING OUT CHILD PORN EVIDENCE APPEALED
Daily Herald, January 4, 2001
By Sean Hamill
Kane County prosecutors Wednesday said they will appeal a judge’s decision to throw out their evidence against a South Elgin pizza restaurant owner charged last year with 32 counts of possession of child pornography.
Kane County Judge Jim Doyle a month ago upheld a prior ruling to throw out the search warrant and all the evidence that led to the arrest of Terrance McCarron, 31. Assistant State’s Attorney Tony Abear told Doyle on Wednesday that his ruling will be appealed.
McCarron’s attorney, Kathleen Colton, said the prosecutors’ decision to appeal Doyle’s ruling “doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me given the court’s ruling, but they have a right to appeal.” It could take at least a year for the Second District Appellate Court in Elgin to rule. Any decision then could also be appealed to the Illinois Supreme Court.
Colton said she will handle the appeal for McCarron, while the state appellate prosecutor will take over the case from the state’s attorney’s office.
Doyle ruled in August that a photo police used to convince a judge to sign a search warrant in 1998 to search McCarron’s home wasn’t necessarily “lewd” or child pornography because it was impossible for Doyle to determine whether the nude, female twins in the photo were underage.
Abear said Wednesday he decided to appeal Doyle’s ruling for the same reasons he had argued in his motion last month for Doyle to reconsider his August ruling.
Among the points Abear argued last month were that South Elgin police should have been granted a “good faith” exception in the case because they reasonably believed that the search warrant was valid. McCarron. 31, owner of Rosati’s Pizza in South Elgin, first was charged in December 1998 after South Elgin police got a letter and a copy of the twins’ photo from a San Bernardino, Calif., sheriff’s deputy who had downloaded the photo from an America Online chat room contact.
That chat-room contact was traced to McCarron’s home, authorities said, and South Elgin police used that information from California to obtain the warrant to search his home.
Police searched McCarron’s home and took his computer and 45 videotapes.
They later claimed that they not only found 31 photos of nude girls on the computer but also videotapes McCarron had made of teenage girls going to the bathroom in his home during a party he threw for Rosati’s employees.
