Up-skirt voyeurism alleged

Miniature digital cameras are everywhere: on just about any cellular telephone you can buy, on handheld computers, and all by themselves in lipstick-size cases attached to key rings.

Sometimes they’re in the wrong place, such as under an unsuspecting woman’s skirt.

That happened in a checkout line of the Newport, Wash., Safeway store, according to a voyeurism charge City Prosecutor Dana Kelley filed earlier this month.

Kelley charged Newport resident Patrick Donald Armour, 42, with using a cellular telephone camera to attempt to take pictures up a 16-year-old girl’s skirt while she stood in a grocery checkout line Oct. 14.

Armour is to be arraigned Jan. 5 in Newport Municipal Court. If convicted of the gross misdemeanor, he could be sentenced to as much as a year in the county jail.

According to court documents, Armour knelt down behind the girl, ostensibly to reach for a candy bar on a bottom shelf, and held a camera-equipped cellular phone under the girl’s skirt. A woman standing in the checkout line ahead of the girl said she looked back and saw Armour place his camera-phone under the girl’s skirt twice.

Newport Police Chief Jeff Troumbley said in a search warrant affidavit that Armour apparently overheard the woman telling the girl what she saw. He said Armour quickly moved to a different checkout line, but the witness and another woman followed him to his pickup and got his license number.

Troumbley said Armour claimed to have been reaching for a candy bar. Armour denied taking any pictures of the girl intentionally, but said, “I may have accidentally,” Troumbley reported.

The chief said he found no suspicious photos on Armour’s cell phone, and a computer expert found none on various pieces of computer equipment seized from Armour’s home. But Armour realized he was under suspicion before he left the Safeway and could have deleted any photos immediately, Troumbley said.

State law prohibits even a “substantial step” toward voyeurism.

Generally, the law presumes people can’t expect privacy in public places. Until last year, though, the law didn’t contemplate the possibility of photographing a woman’s underwear in public without her consent. Nor did it contemplate scores of Internet sites devoted to “up-skirt” photography.

Instead, the law focused on traditional peeping Tom cases, such as peering through bedroom windows, over bathroom stall dividers or through shower-room ventilation grilles – a number of which have been prosecuted in Spokane and other northeastern Washington counties in recent years.

The Washington Legislature amended the voyeurism law last year after a September 2002 state Supreme Court decision demonstrated that technology had raced ahead of the law. In the cases of two men convicted of voyeurism in King and Yakima counties, the court said the voyeurism law didn’t apply in public places.

“It is the physical location of the person that is ultimately at issue, not the part of the person’s body,” Supreme Court Justice Bobbe Bridge said in the court’s written opinion.

In the Yakima County case, rapist Sean Tyler Glas was released from prison because his rape sentence was based partially on a previous conviction for taking pictures under women’s skirts in a Union Gap, Wash., shopping mall.

In the King County case, a woman thought she caught Richard Sorrells’ hand in her purse at an ice cream booth at the Bite of Seattle festival.

“I did not have my hand in her purse,” Sorrells told police. “I was holding my camera so I could videotape up her dress. I am not a thief, I’m a peeping Tom.”

Few people appear to have been prosecuted for that kind of peeping since the Legislature outlawed it last year.

Ed Hay, supervisor of the Spokane County Prosecutor’s Special Assault Unit, said he doesn’t know of any Spokane County case involving up-skirt photography.

A spokesman for the King County Prosecutor’s Office was aware of only one case since the law was changed. In that case, Jack L. Vu was sentenced in January to six months in jail for using a cell phone to photograph a woman’s underwear in a Sammamish, Wash., Safeway store.

As alleged in the Newport case, Vu was caught when another woman alerted the unsuspecting victim.