Alleged victims sue convicted sex offender who won $3 million lottery
A convicted sex-offender-turned-jackpot lottery winner is being sued by two alleged victims for a piece of his prize.
Timothy Poole’s $3 million jackpot lottery win raised eyebrows and a lot of questions earlier this month over whether the 43-year-old, who pleaded guilty to attempted sexual battery of two victims under 12 in 2002, should be allowed to collect his winnings. Though there is no law banning convicted criminals from playing — or winning — the lottery, a 2010 change to Florida law may offer Poole’s alleged victims a shot at his newfound riches.
In 2010, the Florida Legislature passed a law eliminating the statute of limitations for sexual assault victims under age 16 to pursue legal action against their perpetrator. Prior to that, child sex crimes victims could not press charges after age 21. According to a 2010 article in the Tampa Bay Times, the then-new legislation “makes it easier for future victims to seek justice in a courtroom and recover damages.”
Which is exactly what the two brothers suing Poole, identified in the suit only as John Doe 1 and 2, are trying to do.
“We are not attempting to get him any additional prison time,” the plaintiffs’ attorney Mark NeJame told the Orlando Sentinel last week. Rather, NeJame's clients are seeking restitution for the physical and psychological trauma they say Poole caused them, and to pay for the counseling they’ve gone through to overcome it.
In 1999, Poole was charged in Florida with attempted sexual assault on a 9-year-old and was arrested in New York almost two years later. According to the lawsuit filed, the plaintiffs are two brothers who say they were 9 and 5 years old in 1996, when Poole allegedly sexually abused them for more than a year.
Poole has yet to comment on the suit. But in an interview with CBS’s Orlando affiliate for an October report on employed sex offenders, Poole, who works for his family’s taxi company as a cab driver, insisted he was innocent.
“It may be hard for some to believe, but sometimes people are wrongly accused,” Poole said at the time.
It’s unclear whether there is any kind of precedence for a case like the one against Poole, but according to Richard Hornsby, a criminal defense attorney and legal analyst for Orlando’s NBC News affiliate WESH-2, Poole’s accusers “may have a very good chance of collecting some of his lottery riches.”
“I think that’s why the legislature changed the law, because they recognize there will be circumstances where people that preyed on children will come into money and those children ought to be able to come back and try to get reparations for the counseling they had to go through, for the mental and the physical damage that was done to them by these perpetrators,” Hornsby said. ““I think when everything is said and done people will be thinking, ‘There is justice in this world,’ because he’s not going to have the money and the people that deserve it, these children that he victimized, will have the money, there’s no doubt.”
