Sunday, September 16, 2001
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Sunday, September 16, 2001 |
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Substitute found guilty after students testify about improper conduct by substitute teacher
By JOHN MUNFORD
A local teen charged with displaying sexually explicit Web sites to eighth-graders while serving as a substitute teacher at Whitewater Middle School last year has been found guilty by a Fayette County State Court jury. The jury ruled that Charlie Sheets Jr. was guilty on all three counts of deprivation of a minor child. Sentencing is scheduled for Friday at 4 p.m. Defense attorney Scott Ballard agreed Sheets's conduct was inappropriate, but in his closing statement Wednesday morning he said Sheets's actions did not warrant criminal charges. Ballard cross-examined some of the state's witnesses in depth, but he did not produce any witnesses on Sheets's behalf. Sheets was 18 when he served as a substitute teacher at Whitewater in March, in charge of youths who were mostly 14 years old. A number of those students testified in the trial about various images from Web sites that were displayed to the entire class via a television set that was linked to a computer in the classroom. One of the sites showed pictures of a model clothed only in a towel. Another web site showed a video clip of two men in a shower together, one dressed in a thong. Various students testified that at times Sheets was calling up the Web sites from the computer and at other times other students were. An investigation by Sgt. Thomas Pope of the Fayette County Sheriff's Department led to a listing of the Web sites the computer visited that day and several days before which was found on the computer's hard drive. Pope testified that although the list showed the time each site was accessed, it could not show how long the images were on the screen. Still others testified how, before one class, Sheets drew an anatomically correct male "hangman" figure on the board, with a graphic reference to his male anatomy. "These children weren't hurt; these children weren't deprived," Ballard said in his closing arguments, disputing that the students were harmed by viewing the material. State Court Solicitor Steve Harris reminded the jury that Sheets failed to properly supervise the students. "If this isn't bad enough, what is?" Harris said. He added that the material shown to the class "is not pornography" but it still affected the children. "It is a rape of the spirit and the innocence of these children," Harris said. "It is a rape of the morality and values of these children as they have been raised by their parents." Harris also added that testimony showed Sheets "flirted" with two girls in one of the classes he supervised that day. Witnesses said Sheets tried to access a Web site known to have photos of the two girls in bikinis which were taken on a field trip to Costa Rica. Ballard argued that the children were not harmed by the incident. He told the jury if they were disturbed by the images "we had better get rid of TVs and get rid of our magazines." Some of the pictures were on the screen for no more than a few seconds, Ballard said.
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