VOYEURISM EARNS DELRAY SEX OFFENDER 15 YEARS
He took lewd photos of two girls with a hidden camera.
WEST PALM BEACH — When it was his time to speak, Michael J. Dougherty did not try to explain why he set up a camera in a bathroom to surreptitiously take more than 80 lewd photos of 14and 15-year-old girls while their mother was getting cancer treatments.
Instead, Dougherty, a 54-year-old Delray Beach man who was already a convicted sex offender when he was arrested last year on video voyeurism and drug charges, used his last words before Circuit Judge Glenn Kelley sentenced him Wednesday to apologize to the girls’ parents.
“I never meant any of the pain and anxieties they might suffer,” Dougherty said.
Though he didn’t ask Kelley for leniency, the judge nonetheless rejected his defense attorney’s request for a four-year sentence and instead sentenced him to a maximum 15-year prison sentence.
“In this case, two young girls have been violated. There’s no other way to put it,” Kelley said.
Kelley’s sentiments capped a sentencing hearing in the case that began when the girls’ mother discovered the photos on Dougherty’s phone on May 4, 2016 and called police.
The photos showed the girls, who were 14 and 15 at the time, in the bathroom, nude.
According to an arrest report, the girls told police that they never sent Dough- erty any photos of themselves, and a Delray Beach police detective told Kelley at the hearing that they knew nothing about the photos until police questioned them.
At the time, the girls lived primarily with their father but often spent time with their mother, who shared joint custody of them.
The mother, in arrest reports, described Dougherty as her neighbor, and though he was living across the street at the time of the offense, he at one point lived with her.
The mother told Kelley that Dougherty never had any interaction with her daughters, and the girls didn’t even know he was living with her in the house for eight months after his 2014 release from jail on an unrelated charge.
The girls’ parents, whose names The Palm Beach Post is withholding to keep from identifying their daughters, say the two of them are still haunted by the idea that someone took photos of their daughters. The girls declined to attend the sentencing hearing, their father said.
Assistant Public Defender Elizabeth Pohm said the girls didn’t testify and also never wrote victim impact letters to explain how Dougherty’s actions affected them, so anything their parents or Assistant State Attorney Justin Hoover had to say about how Dougherty’s acts harmed them would be hearsay.
Hoover responded by saying that it was clear that a crime like this would have a devastating impact on the teens, with or without the judge hearing it in their own words.
“From now on, they don’t know if they’re changing clothes in the bathroom whether someone will be watching, and they’ve got to live with that forever,” Hoover said.
The girl’s mother begged Kelley to destroy the photos now that the case is closed — a request for which he offered no response.
Dougherty appeared to try to quell the anxieties of the girls’ parents by telling them that he never disseminated any of the photos online.
“I’m not that adept at that stuff,” Dougherty said of using the internet.
He also told the judge: “You’ve got the only copies of whatever it was on that phone.”
Dougherty has a 1999 conviction for lewd and lascivious indecent assault of a child under the age of 16. He served a year in prison, according to prison records, and has had to register as a sex offender ever since.
He’s also spent time in prison on several subsequent cases, including charges of grand theft, marijuana possession, possession of a firearm by a convicted felon and possession of hallucinogens.
He was last released from prison in November 2014, after serving two years for sale of oxycodone.