ARLINGTON, Virginia — A jury unanimously found Richard Cox guilty on both counts of child pornography in the second offense in Virginia’s 17th Judicial Circuit Court.
The Washington Examiner spoke to two jurors after the trial, including one woman who was seen tearing up when the pornographic images found on Cox’s phone were being shown.
“It was just a human reaction,” the female juror told the Washington Examiner.
A male juror said there were no outliers and that all jurors reached the guilty verdict on their own before deliberations. The jury came to a verdict in under 2 1/2 hours.
The jury only needed to determine whether two images from Cox’s cellphone or SD card were child pornography. Cox was previously charged with nine counts of child pornography in Fairfax County and Arlington, Virginia.
Deputy Commonwealth Attorney Nassir Aboreden told the jury in closing arguments that he is fighting for the victims of child pornography, in this case, some as young as 3 years old.
“The evidence has shown Cox sought out over 10 images of child sexual assault material,” Aboreden told the jury in closing statements. “This is for the voiceless victims. We don’t know what country they’re from, or what language they speak. What we do know is that what happened to them is a crime, and Cox possessed images of what happened to these victims.”
Senior public defender Michael Cash told the jury during closing arguments that the screenshots of naked children playing on the beach, approximately ages 7, 12, and 17, were not a crime for Cox to possess. Cash argued the more egregious images were never viewed by Cox because they were in the cache of his phone and SD cards.
The expert witness, Lou Ordonez, said during testimony that the cache is a memory storage on your phone or browser that will save an image to load websites faster. He explained that the cache is more likely to save images from sites a person visits more frequently. Now retired, Ordonez spent 31 years as an Arlington County police officer, 17 of those as a digital forensic detective. Ordonez was the detective who executed the search warrant on Cox’s phone and extracted the data.
Detective Leslie Grever testified that digital forensic detectives were unable to access an SD card with a massive amount of storage because it was encrypted. Grever, who is leading the investigation into Cox in Arlington County, said that by looking at the contents of the phone, Cox was an avid film enthusiast and had made amateur films.
Aboreden said in his closing arguments that the more egregious images found on the SD cards, including the one showing sexual assault of a 3-year-old, were pulled from a video editing website, leading the commonwealth to believe Cox had spent time editing these images.
Cash told the jury that the prosecution is making the SD card out to be the boogeyman.
“The prosecution themselves are saying they don’t know what’s on the card, ‘wink wink’; that’s exactly what is happening here,” Cash said to the jury in closing arguments. “They have no way of knowing what’s on that SD card, and that should not be evidence to a crime.”
Cox is facing a slew of charges in Arlington County. A second trial for those charges will start on April 20.
In that case, victims allege Cox was found walking around naked for hours in front of small children in female locker rooms at rec centers in Arlington. Cox was known to have gone to multiple rec centers in the northern Virginia area and high schools with public pools, where minor children would take swim classes and gymnastics classes and would be changing and in various stages of undress inside the locker room. One witness claims Cox was touching himself in front of her young daughter.
A letter Cox wrote to a judge, while he was in jail for those charges, said he enjoyed exposing himself and being naked in front of children and that it aroused him. That letter was struck from evidence and could not be shown to the jury.
JURY DISTURBED BY CHILD PORN ALLEGEDLY FOUND ON SEX OFFENDER RICHARD COX’S CELLPHONE
Cox, who is a biological male but identifies as a transgender woman, was able to enter these locker rooms because Arlington County policy now allows people to use the restroom of their gender identity over their biological sex.
The sentencing hearing will be on May 1 to include any guilty charges found in the second trial.
