Assault Plea Avoids Sex Abuse Trial

By John Wharton
SoMDNews
March 27, 2015

http://www.somdnews.com/article/20150327/NEWS/150329428/1056/assault-plea-avoids-sex-abuse-trial&template=southernMaryland

A former youth leader at a church avoided trial on a charge of sexually abusing a preteen girl in 2008, by acknowledging Wednesday in a St. Mary’s courtroom that prosecutors had evidence to support a misdemeanor assault charge.

Michael John Havrilla, 46, left the courtroom with a suspended 18-month jail sentence, and a judge’s warning that any further criminal misconduct during three years of supervised probation would put him behind bars.

The plea agreement spared the girl from testifying in the case, the judge and a prosecutor repeatedly said during the proceeding.

“The state’s attorney was in an awful position,” St. Mary’s Circuit Judge Michael J. Stamm said as he carried out the plea deal, which did not require the girl to take the witness stand. “I think it would be devastating for her,” the judge said, “and that’s why I agreed to do it.”

St. Mary’s Assistant State’s Attorney Julie White, amending the abuse charge to second-degree assault, said during the plea hearing that the girl “would like to move forward and resolve this case,” one that the prosecutor said involved touching the girl under her clothes at a residence.

Robyn Riddle, Havrilla’s lawyer, said that her client, a senior systems engineer with Science Applications International Corporation, had served as a youth leader with Faith Bible Church. “That obviously is not occurring at this time,” Riddle said. “He accepts that this is the way his life is going to be.”

During a phone call to Havrilla as part of a 2013 police investigation, according to the prosecutor, he made the remark, “I obviously made mistakes.”

That recorded conversation, and a second one, were the subject of a pretrial dispute between the prosecutor and defense lawyer, including whether the conversations delved into an earlier investigation that had led to no criminal charges against Havrilla.

Riddle sought to block the prosecution from using at trial any information from a 2001 National Security Agency polygraph examination of Havrilla related to a security clearance, in part because alleged misconduct in the earlier matter was “incongruous,” the lawyer wrote, with the allegations in the case from incidents in 2008.

The lawyer wrote that her client “mistakenly” thought he was being asked about the 2001 investigation during the phone conversations two years ago that were monitored by police.

White countered that Havrilla’s earlier comments during the polygraph exam about fondling incidents that sexually aroused him were relevant to the charges from the 2008 incidents, and that “it was clear” that the phone conversations two years ago were about the later incidents. Riddle disputed White’s account of Havrilla’s statements about the 2001 allegations.

Stamm ruled earlier this year that information developed by Charles County authorities in the aftermath of the polygraph exam could not be presented at Havrilla’s trial, in part because no criminal charges or convictions resulted from that investigation, and the judge limited what portions of the recorded phone conversations could be admitted.

Havrilla was released on $50,000 bond after his arrest last June on the indictment charging him with sexual abuse and committing a second-degree sexual offense.

The following month, the prosecutor notified his lawyer that if he was convicted of the sexual offense charge, she would seek enhanced penalties for Havrilla ranging from a mandatory minimum of 15 years in prison, to a possible maximum sentence of life in prison.

Contact: jwharton@somdnews.com