A Harvard University photography student convicted of charges relating to a confrontation with the police over nude photographs of her young son has chosen to go to prison rather than accept a court's alternative.
The court had told her to pay damages to the photo lab that reported her negatives to the authorities as suspicious and to perform 50 hours of community service.The student, Toni Marie Angeli, 31, who was enrolled in Harvard's continuing education program, was convicted on Tuesday by a jury in Cambridge District Court of disorderly conduct and malicious destruction of property in the incident on Nov. 2 at the Zona Photographic Laboratories.
Judge Roanne Sragow sentenced Angeli to 18 months probation, community service and payment of $229 in damages to the photo lab. But Angeli refused the sentence.
"She was not going to do anything willingly that admitted guilt," said her lawyer, John Swomley. "Rather than pay Zona one thin dime, she preferred to go to jail."
Judge Sragow imposed a new sentence of 30 days at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution in Framingham, a women's prison.
At a news conference at the prison, The Boston Globe reported, Angeli said: "When my son is a teenager and I want him to do the right thing - the harder thing - he'll look back and say, `Momma did it.' "
Angeli took the photos of her son, Luke, 4, for the final project of her photography class. She titled the project, which featured Luke at home and in a park with a friend, "Innocence in Nudity."
A technician at Zona who was developing the film noticed the pictures of a naked young boy and became concerned. The lab alerted the Cambridge police, who sent two detectives over when Angeli picked up the film.
She identified herself as a Harvard student and explained that the boy in the pictures was her son. But tempers flared; after a scuffle, Angeli was arrested.
After inquiries by the police, the Middlesex County district attorney's office and the state Department of Social Services, Angeli was not charged with any crimes relating to child abuse or pornography.
Similar situations have arisen in other states. In one high-profile case in New Jersey, Ejlat Feuer, a student at the International Center of Photography in New York City, was arrested in February 1994 after leaving film to be developed that contained pictures of his naked 6-year-old daughter. The photo lab called the police, and Feuer went through a series of legal battles before reaching a deal with a prosecutor that put him on probation.
Massachusetts, unlike New Jersey and other states, does not have a law requiring photo processing labs to report suspicious photos of minors. But in Angeli's case, Zona called the police anyway.
Based on descriptions from Swomley and Rowena Otremba, the owner of the photo lab, the pictures included a low-angle shot of the naked boy being dragged across the torso of a clothed adult male.
Otremba says she had no way of knowing that the photographs were taken by the boy's mother or that clothed man in the pictures was the boy's father. Angeli says other pictures on the same roll make it clear that they are family shots.
A police spokesman, Frank Pasquarello, put their views this way:
"The question is do the police have the right when they feel that a child may be in danger to conduct an investigation? The answer is yes."
Speaking of the police and lab technicians, Angeli said, "There is nothing they saw that warranted them invading my life."