Baptist youth pastor Matthew C. Porter faces a serious problem. His house sitter allowed police to search his hour. The found evidence that made him look less that godly.
Investigators say Porter, 31, secretly taped girls between the ages of 12 and 16 changing and showering at his rental house in Ellenton and in his apartment in Bradenton.
Porter has pleaded not guilty to nine counts of voyeurism, a misdemeanor.
Cases like this give me the creeps. Here is a youth pastor working which children every day of his life. On one hand serving, but with the other hand taping young girls when they are most vulnerable. It seems positively evil.
Porter claims innocence. He's pleaded not guilty. Judge George K. Brown Jr. ruled against him. I am not sure I agree. How is it possible for a second party to grant access to a house? For the good of the case, I hope his ruling stands up on appeal. A better course of action would have been to get a search warrant after the crime was reported. They had the time.
Matthew C. Porter was the youth pastor at Bethel Baptist church in Ellenton, Florida. He has resigned.
4 comments:
while there is a precedence for throwing out cases when a third party gives permission for search of a residence, typically it was because the party granting the permission did not have free unannounced access to said premises. i.e. a Landlord cannot give permission to search a tenents abode.
BUT, if this person was house sitting, had the keys to the house, granted full access, and thus had fiduciary responsiblity for the premises in the owner's absence as approved by the actual owner, then their search should be upheld.
Then again, this would be true in normal states. This is Florida, so who the hell knows. ;)
We've had a case here in LA involving a landlord and 2000 lbs of pot. The search was thrown out.
My hope here is that no appeal will be sought. This guy is likely to settle the case. He does not have much hope at a jury trial.
"We've had a case here in LA involving a landlord and 2000 lbs of pot. The search was thrown out."
Yep..like I said..the landlord is NOT empowered to act on behalf of the tenant.
Funny how many "Youth Pastors" are perverts. You'd think churches would realize that by the nature of the position it would attract pedophiles and they would conduct intensive screening to try and keep them out.
But that requires reason and logic. They tend to prefer relying on "faith".
If it were one of my kids in that video, I'd sue the ass off the creep AND the church for hiring him.
It might hold. The house sitter is essentially the caretaker of the home so granting access to the police should be his/her right. The exception might be if the evidence was in a locked place, something that the house sitter would not have otherwise had access to.
Even if it does get thrown out, you would hope that his days of access to kids would be over. The evidence is, as they say, damning. ;)
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