BEVERLY — A Lawrence Superior Court judge has rejected Thomas Scully's request to dismiss child pornography charges against him.
Judge Richard Welch III's reasons for denying the request remain secret, however, because he wrote his decision in the margins of Scully's motion — which remains sealed from public view.
That's because Scully's attorney, Ronald Ranta, filed the motion under seal, citing a recently enacted state law that requires that motions referencing grand jury testimony be kept impounded. That law was aimed at stemming increasing incidents of witness intimidation. Judges in Salem Superior Court concluded, however, that it applies to all motions in which grand jury testimony is at issue.
Scully, 60, the former director of the Beverly Public Library, is charged with seven counts of possessing child pornography and one count of disseminating obscene material to a minor, a 15-year-old boy he met at the library in 2003 and allegedly invited to his home to look at pornography on a computer.
Two years later, the boy's foster father went to police, troubled by the relationship between the two, which included Scully giving the teenager a cell phone and cash.
During a hearing last week before Welch, Ranta argued that if grand jurors who indicted Scully in 2005 had seen several pieces of evidence that police did not turn over to the prosecutor, including additional child pornography, they might have opted not to indict Scully.
Prosecutor Michael Sheehan argued that the evidence presented to the grand jury was sufficient to obtain an indictment. Sheehan said Scully was engaging in classic "grooming" of a potential sexual assault victim.
Scully was indicted on one charge of indecent assault and battery, but that charge was later dismissed after a judge found that testimony of a police officer may have been unclear about the extent of physical contact.
Ranta also argued that the investigation by state police forensic experts was incomplete because it did not include a virus scan of Scully's computer hard drive. The supervisor of the district attorney's computer crimes unit testified that such scanning technology was not available to the district attorney's office at the time. Commercially available virus scanning does not work on the "mirror image" copies of hard drives that are examined by the experts (they use copies, because accessing the original would alter the drive).
Ranta, reached for comment yesterday, said he does not plan to appeal at this point but said it could become an issue if Scully is convicted and appeals that conviction.
With the decision of the judge, the lawyers will now select a trial date in the case during a hearing on Dec. 11. A trial is not expected to take place until sometime next year.
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