Posted: 1/18/05
Speltz guilty in child porn case
By David Heiller
Argus News Editor
Third District Judge James Fabian found a La Crescent man guilty of three counts attempted possession of child pornography on January 14.
Mark Speltz, 38, was convicted in the case after Houston County attorney Richard Jackson filed amended charges on January 10. The judge then took the case under advisement and made his ruling four days later.
Sentencing will take place on on March 9 at 10 a.m. Fabian assigned the crime a severity level three because there is no evidence that Speltz generated or disseminated the images, Jackson said. The offense calls for a sentence of one year and one day.
An appeal to the Minnesota Court of Appeals will take place after that, Speltzís attorney, Ross Phelps, said on January 14.
Phelps said that courts in many jurisdictions have ruled that the search warrant applications were not sufficient to support the search warrants. Phelps disagreed with Judge Fabianís ruling that the warrant application was sufficient.
ěI think heís wrong and weíre going to appeal that,î Phelps said. The appeal will be done by the state public defender, he added.
The case goes back to March of 2002, when authorities seized the computer, hard drive, storage disks, and software at Speltzís home at 611 North Fourth Street, La Crescent. It was discovered as part of an FBI investigation of the ěCandymanî electronic group suspected of featuring images of child pornography. Speltzís name was among the list of list of Candyman Egroup members.
The equipment was examined by the Minnesota Internet Crimes Against Children Task Office in St. Paul. Authorities found several images that depicted nude juveniles engaged in sexual activity with other juveniles and with adult males.
Six charges dropped
Speltz originally was charged on April 2, 2002 with six additional counts of possession of child pornography. These charges were dropped because of the difficulty of proving whether computer images depict real children, Houston County Attorney Richard Jackson said on January 13.
Three additional counts of attempted possession of child pornography were not dropped.
Speltz waived the right to a jury trial, and instead had the trial on stipulated facts, Jackson said. That process, called a ěLothenbach Trial,î means that Speltz can appeal any incorrect district court rulings to the Minnesota Court of Appeals.
A Lothenbach trial, in which the judge and not a jury rules on the evidence, is used if a person is likely to be convicted but wants to challenge the evidence, Jackson said. It speeds up the process, he added.
Jackson said the case took a long time to prosecute for several reasons. The search warrant was based on an FBI investigation, and not a local investigation ěWe had to obtain documents and supporting documents from the FBI office in Houston, Texas,î he said.
Houston County also did not get updates on other Candyman cases with regard to facts in search warrants.
An FBI agent also testified at one omnibus hearing in Caledonia, and the court trial was bumped a couple times, Jackson said.
The court had already ruled prior to the January 10 trial that the warrant was lawfully executed and Speltzís statements during the seizure were admissible, so Judge Fabian just had to answer whether Speltz attempted to possess child pornography, Jackson said.
Caledonia Argus
314 West Lincoln St.
P.O. Box 227
Caledonia, MN 55921-0227
507/724-3475
E-Mail: editor.argus@ecm-inc.com