Authorities say they’ve reviewed more than a dozen videos of a Baltimore County paramedic masturbating or urinating on public property. In one of them, Christopher M. Carroll appears to contaminate a soap dispenser at a county fire station. A prosecutor said that when he finished, Carroll shook up the bottle before returning it behind the sink, unnoticed.
As distraught, distrustful and unclean these kinds of accusations have made some of his colleagues feel, as of Wednesday, Carroll has not been charged with a sex crime.
If police find more evidence, prosecutors can still consult a grand jury and add accusations to the 23-count case, but examples of immediate, targeted and forceful touching would be needed to make sex-related charges stick, defense attorneys outside the matter told The Baltimore Sun.
“It’s a gray area. … It’s going to be interesting to see how the courts look at it,” said Baltimore-area lawyer Thomas Maronick Jr. “The biggest issue here is I’m not seeing a direct victim, and I don’t see that he intentionally acted to force a specific victim to ingest his fluids. I think if you find specific victims, it might be a different story. But at this point, I think they’ve charged it as best they could.”
In civil hearings involving his wife and two children, the paramedic has described his content as “parody” and consensual role play between adults using his own things. Seth Okin, his defense attorney, said Wednesday that the specific intent of contact with another person was not only absent, “It wasn’t even attempted.”
If anyone came into contact with Carroll’s fluids, Okin said, it was incidental.
Concerns about misconduct at county facilities first arose in late November and early December, sparking an investigation that culminated in Carroll, 36, surrendering to police. He was held without bond on 20 counts of causing someone to ingest a bodily fluid and three counts of malicious destruction of property, all misdemeanors.
On Tuesday, Baltimore County State’s Attorney Scott Shellenberger said law enforcement was “still looking at the case,” including the sexual component of the allegations.
“But at the moment, we feel like the charges we have are the most appropriate, the easiest to prove, and provide sufficient penalties to punish the behavior,” he said.
Per Maryland guidelines, each bodily fluid count carries a maximum punishment of 10 years incarceration and fines of up to $2,500.
Annapolis-based defense attorney Mandeep Chhabra said he was “surprised” the state “didn’t try to stretch the meaning of the sex crimes” and apply them to Carroll’s case.
Although he doesn’t like the practice, Chhabra said prosecutors “often charge things that they can’t prove,” perhaps to gain leverage in plea negotiations or, as he put it, “throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks.”
With a sentencing cap of 200 years, however, the lawyers challenging Carroll might already feel comfortable with the charges and prison time they have to work with, Chhabra said.
“They’re not grasping at straws because they’d have enough to penalize him on the crimes that they can prove and not risk losing something on judgment of acquittal because it doesn’t meet the statutory requirements of the crime,” he said.
When the allegations began springing up, informally at first through rumors and screenshots, fire department employees described anxiety that drove several of them to seek legal counsel and county leaders to pursue upward of $263,000 in cleaning costs and equipment replacements.
In court last week, Baltimore County prosecutor Lauren Stone outlined what has been the most detailed catalogue of videos, allegedly found through pay-to-watch porn sites and directly from the first responder’s cellphone, to date. She accused him of recording himself ejaculating or urinating on the job several times: on a water fountain, on the back of an ambulance, inside a pot of chili and into a bottle of orange juice, among other places.
As she spoke, snickers and groans spilled from the gallery while Carroll hung his head.
Criminal lawyers told The Sun that although ingesting semen and urine is a form of contact, because there was a delay between the alleged action and any contact with fluids — and most of the allegations didn’t appear to target a specific person — charges often used for nonconsensual, sexual contact might not apply.
Chhabra said Carroll’s is also “a very unique situation” because it seems no one saw the behavior in question when it purportedly happened. Even in cases in which someone is seen, such as a man accused of masturbating at a Starbucks in Annapolis, though indecent exposure charges were issued, sex offenses were not.
Glen Burnie defense lawyer Peter O’Neill said if the legislature wanted the kinds of allegations against Carroll to be considered a sex offense or an assault, they would have written them into the code instead of creating the bodily fluids statute — which he said “addresses this very conduct.”
Criminal attorney Bradley Shepherd referenced an accusation that Carroll contaminated his supervisor’s keyboard. Shepherd said even if the defendant could have reasonably anticipated someone coming into contact with his sperm or urine, that is not the same as proving misdemeanor assault.
Shepherd, who has defended clients throughout Central Maryland, compared the allegation to someone who goes to the bathroom and doesn’t wash their hands. If that person goes off and types on someone else’s keyboard, Shepherd asked whether they committed a crime because they “didn’t behave in a cleanly enough manner?”
“It’s a really difficult line to draw,” Shepherd said. “I certainly don’t envy the legislators who had to draw this line, but this is where they drew it.”
Carroll’s defense attorney said after last week’s bond hearing that he planned to ask a circuit court judge for another bail review. As of Wednesday afternoon, a new court date had not been set.
Have a news tip? Contact Luke Parker at lparker@baltsun.com, 410-725-6214, on X as @lparkernews or on Signal as @parkerluke.34.
from Baltimore Sun https://ift.tt/Q0CBv8D
via IFTTT
