A former Warminster police officer has been convicted of trying to arrange a sex date with a teenager on the Internet who turned out to be one of his own: an Abington police detective patrolling for predators in cyberspace.
John Powell had told Montgomery County Court that he was only role playing when he fell into a two-hour online sex chat with what he thought was an adult woman role playing as a 13-year-old girl who agreed to meet him at a mall in February 2004. “His story didn’t hold up,” assistant district attorney James Staerk told reporters after the verdict. “He was caught red-handed.”
Powell’s jury needed only two and a half hours of deliberation to convict him April 6 on all charges filed against him, meaning he would face a maximum 27 ½ to 58 years behind bars when he is sentenced. He was convicted of attempted statutory sexual assault, attempted involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, attempted indecent assault, attempted corruption of a minor, and attempted unlawful communication with a minor.
Powell declined to comment on the verdict when invited to do so by the trial judge, but his wife reportedly wept while saying, “You got to be kidding me. There’s no way,” about her husband’s conviction. Powell’s attorney, Jack McMahon, said the family had actually thought the case went well.
“They thought the nightmare was over,” MCMahon said when the court was in recess for the jury’s deliberation. “Now the nightmare has just begun.” He added that he thought it was hard to sway jurors because the case dealt with an actual or suggested child. And he vowed to get Powell the lowest possible sentence and eventually appeal.
Powell went to Willow Grove Park Mall to meet the person he thought he was chatting with, according to several reports about the case, but police waiting for him seized a vibrator and a bottle of sexual enhancement pills from his truck. A day earlier, Powell spent two hours sending messages about what he planned to do sexually with the girl as well as promising to buy her erotic lingerie and adult toys.
He told the court he went to the mall only to see who his chat partner actually was and that he would have left if she actually was 13, but would have tried talking and having sex if she was actually a woman.
A former Philadelphia police officer who joined the Warminster department in late 2003, Powell was fired by the Warminster department soon after his arrest.
