Ex-North Belle Vernon coach Prinkey wants sex charges dismissed
A former North Belle Vernon councilwoman awaiting trial on allegations that she molested a teenage girl she coached on her softball team claims police coerced her to make a confession.
Heather Prinkey, 37, contends that Westmoreland County detectives threatened to have her daughter removed from her custody, to alert the media about the sexual allegations and to arrest her if she did not confess to having improper sexual relations with a 15-year-old girl, according to court documents filed Tuesday by her attorney, Noah Geary.
Geary said that detectives Robert Weaver and Richard Kranitz refused to leave Prinkey's home until she admitted the sexual contact. He claims that police never advised Prinkey of her constitutional rights to remain silent and to retain an attorney and implicated that media attention to the case would cause great embarrassment to her father, who is a minister.
"Consequently, it cannot be said looking at the totality of the circumstances that any statements made were in fact made voluntarily," Geary wrote.
The defense wants Judge Debra A. Pezze to bar prosecutors from using the first confession, as well as a second statement Prinkey gave to police, as evidence at her upcoming trial, slated for August.
Assistant District Attorney Jackie Knupp said police used no threats to obtain the confessions.
"Evidence at the preliminary hearing clearly indicates the confessions were freely and voluntarily given," Knupp said.
Prinkey resigned from North Belle Vernon council a week before she was arrested last summer. The teen came forward with allegations that Prinkey had repeated sexual contact with the girl, beginning in October 2007, when she was 12 years old.
The accuser told police the alleged assaults began as kissing and groping and then escalated to oral sex and experimentation with sexual devices.
During a preliminary hearing, Weaver said the accuser's mother called police in May 2008 when she discovered sexual photographs of Prinkey on the girl's cell phone.
Geary has asked Pezze to dismiss charges of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and a related offense of aggravated indecent assault, claiming there is not enough evidence to warrant those counts.
In addition, Prinkey claims that police used illegal search warrants to collect incriminating evidence from her text messages, e-mails and photographs. She wants the judge to ban their use as trial evidence, along with handwritten letters from Prinkey addressed to the accuser and her mother.
Pezze will conduct a hearing on July 27 on Prinkey's motions.
The trial is scheduled in August, so the accuser won't have to testify once school begins, Knupp said.
