Ex-GMU player goes to bat for man in child porn case
By: Freeman Klopott
Examiner Staff Writer
March 19, 2009
Lamar Butler — the hero of George Mason University’s Cinderella basketball run to the 2006 NCAA Final Four — is among the more than dozen people who sent letters to a federal judge in Alexandria, asking for leniency in the sentencing of a popular Northern Virginia coach recently convicted of child pornography possession.
Butler met Thomas “Randy” White in the summer of 2001. White coached Butler and other players at the NOVA United AAU Basketball youth league.
Butler wrote in a letter to Judge Claude Hilton that he did not want to go home to Oxon Hill in the summer of 2004 because many of his friends had been killed in random violence, so White let Butler spend that time living in White’s basement.
Hilton is expected to sentence White on Friday. White’s attorneys are asking for a five-year sentence — the minimum under sentencing guidelines — in part because of the years he spent coaching in the youth league.
Prosecutors are asking for at least eight years, arguing that possessors of child pornography are a threat to the community because they’re likely to act on their desires for young children and form online communities that make them feel they’re acting within social norms when they view child pornography.
White admitted in his Dec. 4 guilty plea that he received more than 600 child pornographic images in spring 2007, many of them portraying prepubescent boys. At AAU, White coached boys between the ages of 12 and 17.
For Butler, White is a man with faults, but faults that should be forgiven. “The man that stands before you has made mistakes,” Butler wrote the judge, “but I am willing to stake my name on the fact that the good outweigh the bad.”
