WASHINGTON (DC)
Baltimore Sun
JESSICA GRESKO
WASHINGTON (AP) — A once-prominent Orthodox rabbi’s argument that his sentence for secretly videotaping nude women at a Jewish ritual bath should have been limited to one year in jail seemed unlikely to sway a Washington appeals court at a hearing Tuesday.
Rabbi Bernard Freundel, a former Towson University professor, was arrested in 2014 after one of his recording devices was discovered at the National Capital Mikvah in Washington. Prosecutors found he filmed some 150 women using recording devices hidden in a clock radio, a fan and a tissue box holder, and he ultimately took a plea deal in the case and was sentenced to approximately 6 1/2 years.
Freundel acknowledged as part of the plea deal that from 2009 to 2014 he secretly recorded women in a showering and changing area of the mikvah, a ritual cleansing bath he worked to have built. A statute of limitations would have barred prosecutors from charging Freundel for every recording, and he pleaded guilty to 52 counts of voyeurism, a charge that carries up to a year in jail.
A judge sentenced him to 45 days on each count, running the sentences one after another.
On Tuesday, his lawyer, Jeffrey Harris, argued to a three-judge panel of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals that the sentences should have merged and run concurrently, meaning Freundel would have served 45 days.
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