The Tampa Tribune from Tampa, Florida • 26

2-Citrus The Tampa Tribune-Times Sunday, April 5, 1987" Point Of View Crown Hotel's so special city should amend its plans Mr I fl vi Editorial and that it can legally be taken for a widened road. That doesn't make the taking of this property right. Many cities would love to have an edifice as attractive as the Crown Hotel, even if it were to be dropped in the middle of Main Street. A building such as this is worth designing a town around. A meeting is to be arranged next week among city officials, state transportation engineers and hotel representatives.

We hope it is productive. We hope arrangements can be made to preserve the small-town atmosphere of Semi-nniP Avenue. Trees, canopies and a grassy When someone asks for a description of Inverness, they're likely to hear first about the wonderful old hotel that seems to belong to another time and another country. The elegant Crown Hotel helps put Inverness on the map. It lures tourists who make day trips to visit other area attractions.

It makes travelers draw a circle around Inverness on their Florida maps. The Crown Hotel is more than a tourist attraction. It adds a classic air of grace to a downtown suffering the same business deterioration and traffic problems that plague main streets everywhere. In attacking the traffic problems, officials are about to diminish the town's best feature. Plans call for a widening of Seminole Avenue to within four feet of the old hotel.

The street lamps along the wide sidewalk and the canopied portico would have to go. And what would replace them? A strip of asphalt. Some priorities are getting out of order here. We understand that this property along Seminole Avenue is a public right of way, median don't have to be pushed aside if prog ress is to be made. Intelligent progress pre Xk I 1 fX XJ i VXl i ft serves the best of the past.

Even New York City has managed to leave mnre than four feet of walking space in ironi nf its hotels. Surelv Inverness can move its traffic without taking an ugly bite out of its own history. W. iT THEY GWEiOUr jBgBafiaaj'iss Tribune photograph by SONYA DOCTORIAN during the Citrus County Schools Arts Festival held at the high school football stadium in Lecanto. Clay handiwork Dan Mannis, a senior at Lecanto High School, uses a potter's wheel to form a bottle from a lump of clay Saturday afternoon Mosquito.

From Page 1 "At night we can't go out when it gets in the 60s, and the rain, that stops us also," Maynard said. Mosquitoes are less active in cooler weather, so the nightly spraying is not as effective. Rain also hampers the fogging activities and dissipates diesel fuel which crews spray on standing water to kill mosquito larvae, he said. "As long as it stays frosty, it's not going to hurt us," Maynard said of recent cool nights. "Weather like we had Wednesday and Thursday (nights), that kinda slows things down," he said of mosquito activity.

Crews put out traps recently to monitor mosquito activity. "The two nights it was so cold we didn't catch anything," Maynard said. "They're more active in warm weather." Warm weather also helps mosquitoes reproduce more quickly, with summer temperatures resulting in the insects hatching in a week or less, Maynard said. A mosquito generally lives about two weeks, he said. Once the cool, rainy weather subsides, Maynard's crews will begin their efforts to control mosquitoes.

"We were intending to start our night (fogging) program this week," he said Friday afternoon. He anticipates the usual seasonal battle. "We got quite a few of them with the little bit of warm weather we had" a week ago, he said. "I expect we'll have quite a few more of them once it gets real hot," he said. "But I don't look for a real bad siege, just the normal amount" Flood From Page 1 forecast peak is 10 feet there, and will be reached Friday, Brooks said.

Any decision to evacuate will be made early in the week by local civil defense personnel, Brooks said. A warning had been issued Friday by the River Forecast Center in Atlanta, when it was expected the river would rise two feet by Tuesday. The Citrus County Commission followed with an emergency ordinance restricting boat speeds on the waterway. Other hard-hit areas are expected to be those near the State Road 200 bridge at the Citrus-Marion County line, the advisory stated. Residents in the Arrowhead subdivision north of Hernando have been offered shelter at the Hernando Civ ITEM: COUNTY TELLS FLOOD VICTIMS AID IS LIMITED.

ic Center by the Marion-Citrus Red Cross. Man guilty of beating By DAVID SOMMER Tribune Staff Writer NEW PORT RICHEY An Embassy Hills man was found guilty Friday of severely beating the 4-year-old child of his live-in girlfriend in a May 21, 1986 incident A jury deliberated for about an hour before finding Charles Wayne Carpentier, 38, formerly of 116 Fairfax Drive, guilty of a charge that carries a maximum sentence of five years. Judge W. Lowell Bray said the jury's verdict of guilt for child abuse causing great bodily harm is less serious than the aggravated child abuse charge Carpentier originally faced. That charge carries a sentence of up to 15 years.

Prosecutor Ellen Condon said during the trial that sheriffs deputies arrived at the Fairfax Drive home the afternoon of May 21 to find the boy suffering a bruised forehead, a bloody lip, a black eye and numerous welts and bruises all over his body. Deputies were called by neighbors who reported hearing Station From Page 1 as this one were rare until recently, but have become more common as communications companies seek tc reach larger audiences and towei technologies have improved, indus try spokesmen said. Final tower plans sometimes must be altered so that structures don't interfere with air traffic, he said. Cameron said, "It's being built by a company who intends to use the tower for a lot of other things, and of course the taller the tower the better the coverage." Should the FCC award Cameron's group the permit, and the school's trustees agreed, a broadcast station would have to be built on the campus, and a tower would be constructed, and equipment purchased, all at a total cost of a "couple million," Cameron said. It would be paid for by private grants, state funds and support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Cameron said.

The station would be similar to University of Florida's Public Broadcasting Service station Channel 5, WUFT in Gainesville, which is used to train students for broadcasting degrees. A second applicant is Florida Educational Television of Marion County, which the application said is a not-for-profit group. Dr. R. William Henkel, Boca Raton, president of that group, said he would use much of the station time to broadcast credit and non-credit courses supplied by a national consortium that produces the courses.

A similar set-up operates for the city-wide colleges of Chicago, and would allow students to take courses from distant schools, he said. The station also proposes to provide performing arts, news and local events and public affairs programs. The officers and directors of the proposed station are also officers and directors of Florida Educational Television of Treasure Coast permit holder of WFET-TV, Channel 21 in Fort Pierce and Florida Educational TV of Monroe County, permit holder of WETV-TV, Channel 13 in Key West, states a copy of Henkel's FCC application, which is stored in the Ocala Public Library. "A great majority of the educational, cultural and public service programming planned for distribution on the (two other) stations will be available for immediate broadcast on Channel 29," the application states. Henkel, who said he was the first to apply for the channel in August, said he chose Ocala for his station because of it's central location in a fast growing area, and because all available channels in Orlando are occupied.

His station would mount its antenna on the side of an existing tower, one that transmits the signal of Ocala's WBSP-TV Channel 51, the application says. The third applicant is Gospel Horizons but information about the group was not immediately available. Also, a proposal has been filed with the FCC to allocate a new channel to Crystal River, Channel 39, FCC records state. William F. Parish 'is listed as having proposed the new channel.

Information about Parish and whether he also would seek to build a station there was not immediately available. Jurors said their verdict was based on a videotaped statement by the stepdaughter and testimony by a physician who examined her. "But," one juror said, "it (the sister's testimony) certainly didn't help his case." Assistant State Attorney Ken Jo-hansen said the sister's testimony was designed to counter the brother's statements after his arrest that he couldn't recall whether he had abused his stepdaughter because he suffered blackouts. "Our purpose is using the Williams Rule was to show there was no mistake, that he meant to do it," Johansen said. The purpose cited by Johansen appears to be similar to the one in a 1959 Florida Supreme Court decision for which the Williams Rule is named.

In Williams vs. Florida, a man accused of attacking a woman in her car outside a St. Petersburg shopping center claimed he had thought the car was his sister's and climbed in by mistake. But prosecutors produced a witness who said she had been attacked by the same man in the same parking lot The Supreme Court upheld the judge's decision to allow the witness to testify, according to Charles Ehr-hardt, an FSU law professor and co-author of the Florida Evidence Code. Appellate courts are divided on the issue and it could take years for the issue to be resolved by higher courts, Ehrhardt said.

(Harper's attorney has filed an appeal based partly on Huffstetler's decision to allow the Indiana teen-agers to But Williams Rule evidence should not be used simply to demonstrate a defendant's propensity to commit a certain type of crime, he said. Defense attorneys complain that prosecutors have begun abusing the original intent of the rule to overwhelm jurors with evidence that their clients are bad guys. Springstead contends that prosecutors' attitude appears to be: "If we can't convict someone of the primary offense, let's convict him by all the other stuff we can drag up." Springstead argues that "that's not the way the American system is supposed to work." In a trial last week, Judge Huffs-tetler allowed the sister of a man charged with sexual battery on his stepdaughter to testify that her brother, Springstead's client, had molested her 20 years ago when they were children. Springstead said the sister's testimony was inappropriate and prejudicial to his client, who later was found guilty of sexual battery on a child and sentenced to life in prison. "It really stretches the imagination when you can go back 15, 18 years to something that happened in Maryland between two kids," Springstead said.

Interviews with several of the jurors in the case, however, indicated that the sister's testimony may not have been an important factor in the jury's unanimous guilty verdict "The fact that the man had done it before did not prove he did it this time. You can get drunk once and never take another drink," said one juror, who did not wish to be Rule From Page 1 background that could lead jurors to conclude: "Once a criminal, always a criminal." In criminal law, juries are excluded from hearing evidence about a defendant's past behavior if it is not directly related to his actions in the case at hand. For instance, the fact that someone has two previous convictions for driving while intoxicated cannot be introduced at his third drunken-driving trial. "The defendant cannot be convicted for (one) offense because he was arguably involved in an earlier offense," says Steve Goldstein, a law professor at Florida State University in Tallahassee. But under the Williams Rule, prosecutors may introduce evidence-of a defendant's earlier behavior if it helps establish the identity of the defendant, his motive or whether the defendant broke the law by mistake.

For example, police might have a sketchy description of a knife-wielding man who held up a convenience store at midnight. The prosecution may seek to establish a suspect's identity through testimony that the same man had been caught holding up several other convenience stores in the neighborhood with a similar knife and at the same time of night. Jeffrey Lewis, associate dean of law at the University of Florida, said during an interview last week that Williams Rule evidence should be like a "fingerprint" that shows "unique, distinct and Identical" actions by a defendant bloodcurdling screams for about two hours, the assistant state attorney said. The boy subsequently told investigators that Carpentier beat him with a belt and that he was routinely beaten by both Carpentier and his mother, Debbie Crain, according to court documents..