Our Firm Obtains Probation Sentence in Federal Child Porn Case

Our lawyers recently convinced a conservative federal judge to sentence our client to straight probation in a federal child pornography case. Our client, a prominent Georgia lawyer, will not spend a single day in jail.

Federal child porn cases, also known as sexual exploitation of children cases, rarely receive sentences with no jail time. In fact, statistics show that only about one person in the entire country receives such a sentence in any given year. Our firm has an impressive track record for dismissals, reductions, and lenient sentences in even the toughest child pornography cases. You can read here how we defend against these cases.

This particular case was in Athens, Georgia, which is in the Middle District of Georgia. This is a notoriously conservative and difficult jurisdiction where judges routinely hand down guidelines’ sentences of 70 months or more in simple child porn possession cases. We were able to convince the judge by first convincing the U.S. Attorney’s Office that probation was the right result.

Our client’s home was raided by federal law enforcement agents nearly ten years ago as part of Operation Pacifier. This was a nationwide federal investigation targeting individuals who allegedly logged into a website on the dark web called Playpen. Law enforcement used a specialized software to capture the IP addresses of alleged users. Police then obtained search warrants and searched the homes of hundreds individuals across the country, including New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Georgia, Florida, Texas, and Colorado, California, and Washington.

To make matters more complicated, our client was a prominent lawyer – the type of person that the feds love to charge for the sake of headlines in news articles. Our firm got to work and hired the best computer forensics experts to analyze the seized devices. We first discovered that the images our client was accused of possessing were stored in unallocated space. Unallocated space is a portion of the hard drive where files and data are typically stored after being deleted and require specialized software to be seen.

The problem with files in unallocated space is that they don’t tell much of a story. That is to say that an expert usually can’t tell when they file was put there, how it got there, how many times it had been opened, and where it originally came from. At any trial, the Government must prove all elements of the offense beyond a reasonable doubt. In a possession of child pornography case, this means being able to prove that a specific person knowingly possessed the image or video. This becomes difficult to do when there is little information to tell how the image was put on the computer in the first place.

We also attacked the Government’s case by filing a number of powerful and complicated legal motions, requesting that the Court compel the Government to turn over additional documents and to dismiss the case due to an illegal search. We also lined up character witnesses and fact witnesses to talk about our client being a leader in the community.

These three things won the day: aggressive legal motions, defense friendly witnesses, and a computer forensics expert. By combining these three factors, we were able to convince the Government to give our client a binding plea agreement to probation for five years. Normally, judges in federal court have discretion to sentence a defendant up to the statutory maximum (20 years in prison), but a binding plea, if accepted by the judge, forces the judge to sentence the defendant to the amount of time agreed upon by the parties.

While a probation sentence in federal child pornography cases is difficult to achieve, it is not impossible. The key ingredients are hard work, good lawyering, and specialized knowledge in the field of computer forensics. We are very happy that our client won’t spend a single day in prison and that he will be able to spend his time raising his children instead being behind bars.

If you have been accused of a federal child pornography crime, give us a call at (855) 959-4003. We have extensive experience representing clients in federal courts across the country who are charged with serious internet sex crimes. In fact, we wrote the book on how to defend these cases.