A Dalton man the Dalton Police Department arrested in October on a “peeping Tom” charge has been found not guilty.
Jorge Omero Magana, 44 at the time, was charged with felony peeping Tom and loitering/prowling. He faced one to five years in prison.
“The court dismissed the stalking charge, and the jury found Mr. Magana not guilty of being a peeping Tom,” said Public Defender Mike McCarthy.
McCarthy said Magana is a legal resident originally from Mexico and speaks little English. McCarthy said the charges came about when Magana was near the Underwood Lodge apartments and discovered a driver’s license that belonged to one of the residents there. McCarthy said Magana went to return it, and when the license owner saw him the young woman believed he was a man who had been watching her through a window days earlier.
According to Georgia law, “the term ‘peeping Tom’ means a person who peeps through windows or doors, or other like places, on or about the premises of another for the purpose of spying upon or invading the privacy of the persons spied upon and the doing of any other acts of a similar nature which invade the privacy of such persons.”
“The lady said that a man was standing outside of her bedroom window. This was dark, and this was an Hispanic man, wearing a dark-colored shirt and a dark-colored hat, but that was the only description she gave,” McCarthy said. “I think that was a misidentification from the week before.”
McCarthy said the jury of seven women and five men in Judge Jack Partain’s courtroom took about 30 minutes to deliberate before returning the verdict.
District Attorney Bert Poston said he presented the case because he believed the evidence was strong enough for a conviction, but he respects the jury’s decision.
Local News
July 4, 2012
Accused ‘peeping Tom’ found not guilty
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‘It was a brutal time’
Dr. William Blackman, left, explains how amputations were done during the Civil War with a bone saw as Brett Huske looks on at the Hamilton House Saturday. (Matt Hamilton/The Daily Citizen)
Dr. William Blackman opened a box of tools consisting of medical instruments, including a saw, and proceeded to tell visitors how they were used more than a century ago to amputate limbs for soldiers wounded on the battlefield.
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