A man accused of raping a teenaged runaway is off the hook after having photos of his penis taken and submitted to a jury.

Crown attorney Anna Maleszyk withdrew a sexual-assault charge against Ljubomir Todinovski, 38, yesterday, saying she was no longer confident she could persuade a jury to convict him.

Mr. Todinovski's trial on the 1996 charge ended in a hung jury last month.

The alleged victim -- a small-town girl from east of Toronto who says Mr. Todinovski picked her up at the Eaton Centre, lured her to his apartment, then raped her -- testified that she believed Mr. Todinovski's penis was circumcised.

The Crown called an expert witness to testify on the variations in male anatomy.

Sheila MacDonald, a nurse and co-ordinator of sexual-assault victims' services for Ontario, told the jury that uncircumcised penises usually appear to be circumcised while in an erect state because the foreskin retracts automatically.

Ms. MacDonald did not see the three snapshots of Mr. Todinovski that were taken by his wife and submitted as evidence by lawyer Philip Patterson.

The three full-frontal shots show Mr. Todinovski's penis in a flaccid state, in an erect state with the foreskin covering the end, and erect with the foreskin retracted.

Jurors were unable to agree on a verdict. Ms. Maleszyk said she has never heard of a defendant submitting photos of his own penis at trial before.

Mr. Patterson said it was his idea, though he delegated the job of taking the actual photos to Mr. Todinovski's wife because "I wasn't going to do it."

The lawyer said he doubted the case would lead to a flurry of penis snapshots being presented to jurors. "Every case turns on its own facts," he said. "Sometimes you have to meet the evidence head-on, and in this case we did."