Police apparently drop plan to photograph 17-year-old’s genitals

Police in Virginia seem to have dropped a plan to photograph a 17-year-old suspect’s erect penis.

Manassas City Police, investigating a sexting case in which the high school student is accused of sending videos to his girlfriend, were seeking to take the photos so they could try to prove he committed the crime of capturing such images of himself, said Carlos Flores Laboy, a lawyer representing the teenager.

The teen’s aunt and guardian, Stacy Bigley, said police had a warrant to take the pictures.

“We are not going to serve the search warrant,” police Lt. Brian Larkin told the Los Angeles Times on Thursday. He declined to provide any details about the warrant.

Bigley said she and the teen’s lawyer had not heard from police about the development. “What they’re saying may be true, but we haven’t heard it directly from them,” she told The Times.

The teen faces felony charges of making and possessing child pornography.

News of the plan to take the photographs sparked a furor on the Internet on Wednesday.

Flores Laboy and Bigley said that police photographed the teenager’s genitals last month but wanted the additional photos for better comparison to their evidence. In order to make his penis erect, they planned to take him to a hospital and give him an injection, Bigley said.

The Manassas City Police Department said in a statement Wednesday that it’s not its policy “to authorize invasive search procedures of suspects in cases of this nature and no such procedures have been conducted in this case.”

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