A Duke lacrosse player, already facing a rape trial in Durham, N.C., could be thrown in a District jail for violating a curfew stemming from a drunken Georgetown brawl last fall.
Collin Finnerty, 19, is one of three lacrosse players charged with raping an exotic dancer at a riotous off-campus party earlier this year.
The rape charges put Finnerty in deeper legal jeopardy because he and two friends had been arrested after a fight in a Georgetown sidewalk in November.
Finnerty was put into a first-time offenders’ program that gave him a chance to clean his record as long as he did community service and didn’t get into any more trouble.
When D.C. authorities kicked him out of the program after the rape charges, Judge John Bayly gave him a strict curfew.
In a contentious hearing Monday, Bayly told Finnerty’s lawyer that officials called his home on the evening of May 4 and couldn’t reach him.
“It’s not the time for your client to be away,” Bayly said.
He ordered Finnerty’s lawyers to return to court next week to explain their client’s apparent absence.
Finnerty wasn’t in court Monday.
His lawyers are fighting desperately to keep him from going on trial in D.C. until later this year.
They say that an early trial — prosecutors are pushing for July 10 — could cost him a chance to call his friends Patrick Bonanno and Daniel D’Agnes as witnesses.
Bonanno and D’Agnes were arrested with Finnerty in the Georgetown fight. They are still in the first-time offenders program and claim any testimony could be used to convict them of the assault.
D.C. authorities could not reach the three men and the judge said their lawyers need to explain their absence next week.
It is also a fact that anything Finnerty says on the stand in D.C. can be used against him in the rape trial.
Bayly will hear arguments on the matter next week.
