My Sentencing 10/30/2010 (Part One)

 [I am back working through my pretrial detention journal. It is out of order. Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. You can find everything from my pretrial detention journal that is published under the “Pretrial Detention” link under topics on the right hand of your screen.… Even more confusing, this seems to have been sent to KH, and I wrote another piece on my sentencing. The original, handwritten notes are 8 pages long. I am splitting this piece in two, and will publish the later, second piece directly after this. In these entries, I am rather blunt about my crimes; the squeamish may want to go read something else. One last thing, I have edited some words because I found after I got my monitoring software that certain words blocked access to my blog; these have been altered. My sentencing hearing was 10/29/2010. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 11/09/2025] 

The sisters, one niece, two of my friends and CC appeared for my sentencing hearing. We started late. The government did not like the report that the report that I was not a p*dophile. They introduced the photos, and one of my arresting officers testified. Much to my lawyer's disappointment, the judge gave what I expected to receive - 151 months in federal prison and a lifetime of supervision by the federal court. I am now a villain.

The government used the number, and content, of the photos to paint me as a creature of various virulent propensities for evil. I never thought I would ever appear so distinctly horrendous for these reasons. Once upon a time, I thought my loutish bad temper would make a horror of me. Add to this the online dialog I had and my going to meet what was an allegedly a 41 year -old woman (and whom I correctly suspected was a cop) were the nails in the coffin.

The judge bought the idea that I was a predator. My 151 months serves to deter me from further crimes. I assume the post-imprisonment supervision for life serves the dame purpose; registration as a SO, not to be where children are unsupervised children, not to be around adults with children without announcing my status, no viewing erotic/nude/pornographic images, and lie detector tests to complement everything. I am not sure how giving the federal probation officer veto power over all my credit purchases for years has much to do with anything.

Those of you playing around online need to consider this: the bullshit you put out online will be taken as reality in a courtroom.

Those of you trading in illegal porn: the more you have, the more dangerous a person you become to the government. My attorney argued (as in Dorvee and other cases) the computer enhancement ought not apply. The judge thought the federal sentencing enhancement for using a computer should still apply. His reasoning was that it made my crime easier. I think his reasoning, novel, had a point, and adroitly sidestepped the issue.

Having more than 600 images made me out to be a very sick puppy. What no one said anything about was how 600 images in the days of broadband were not comparable to 600 images in the days of dial-up. I never knew I had that many. I only knew I had more than I cared to see.

The judge also gave a very good reason for all this severity: my transmitting could easily influence the weak-minded into committing acts of child abuse. This is much better than the reasoning put forward by the probation officer. She wrote in my pre-sentence report that my actions created a market for illegal porn. Considering how many of the images I did see were duplicates, there does not seem a market for creators as much as one for recycling. The judge hit the mark, the moral mark, in my opinion.

According to my younger sister, the officers snickered and smirked wile I gave what I called my eulogy at my own funeral. But the one officer who testified proved a point of mine: their investigative techniques will catch the suicidal and the stupid (those having read these notes know I thought of myself as being in the first category, and they would have me in the second). I gave them my passwords to Gigatribe and Yahoo with enthusiasm. The officer testified that they failed because those trading in illegal porn want child porn sent tot them first. No one asked why I did do this.

There was a third site where I was in full loathing of where I was and what I had seen. When they [the cops] appeared on yahoo, I assumed they were cops. I wanted to get caught. The cops questioned nothing. They got a villain and could cash their pay checks with a good conscience. That they were no closer to the producers of the filth went unnoticed.

[I intended to keep any comments to the end of Part Two. However, even after 15 years I remain angry about one item that appears here. I gave ICE and the officer from Hamilton County my passwords so that they could get access to who I was dealing with. They could have used this information as probable cause for searching the internet accounts of the people I knew on Gigatribe and Yahoo. The officer testified also that this information was more generally useless. I continue to believe their not using this information indicates their incompentence, their wanting arrests to make publicity that would get them funding without doing any real work, or a combination of the two. Continued in My Sentencing 10/30/2010 (Part Two sch 11/9/2025.]