SJC says the try’s the thing with potty pics
Conviction of UMass Med School doc upheld
The state’s top court flushed away one UMass Med School doctor’s argument that attempting to sneak pictures of a urinating stranger shouldn’t be charged the same as actually taking them.
Now-former med school prof Dr. Markus Cooper of Grafton was convicted in 2019 of a 2015 incident in which he reached his cellphone over the top of a stall in the school’s ladies’ room to take pictures of a med student on the toilet.
Cooper’s case has whizzed up to the Supreme Judicial Court, where he argued that because the cops never found any photos of the woman on his phone, he shouldn’t have been able to be convicted of the crime of “photographing a person who is nude or partially nude.”
Basically, he posited, the most he was doing was making an attempt to photograph her, and his legal representation contended that that isn’t included in the charge. Similarly, maybe there was a “misfire,” his lawyer argued, suggesting that even if the phone did make a photo-taking noise, it might have glitched and not have actually snapped a picture.
The SJC quickly relieved itself of those arguments, with Associate Justice Gregory Massing penning an opinion upholding the conviction on all counts.
The original case, per Massing’s rehashing of it in the opinion, began with a med student “hovering over a toilet in the process of urinating” in the med school’s Worcester campus’ Albert Sherman Center — named after the legendary late Boston-area politico — when “she looked up and saw a cell phone camera ‘peering into the stall’ and ‘one knuckle’ of a hand.”
“She then ‘heard a non-distinct sound. It could have been a camera, click,'” per the summary. The woman shrieked and heard someone run out of the bathroom.
She followed, found Cooper and confronted him, to which he “replied that he had been on his cell phone and had gone into the wrong restroom.” He also asserted, “I didn’t take any pictures of you.”
After a brief confrontation, he dashed off. About 13 minutes later, he showed up at the police station to give a statement, and handed over his phone. The cops then didn’t find pictures of the woman on it.
Cooper had also argued that he shouldn’t be convicted of “disorderly conduct,” because he didn’t do anything to warrant that charge. But the judges asserted that “Peeping Toms” like him have long histories of being charged with that crime and successfully convicted of it.
He further said that the prosecution shouldn’t have suggested that Cooper could have simply deleted any photos, but Massing wrote, “The prosecutor’s argument that the defendant deleted the photograph did not exploit suppressed evidence, let alone create a substantial risk of a miscarriage of justice.”