A federal judge has sentenced a man to prison for collecting and distributing more than 1,000 images and 114 videos of child pornography.
U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter handed Charles Simons 30 months of incarceration followed by supervised federal probation for a decade when he emerges back into freedom.
According to a Department of Justice report, Simons could have been punished by as much as 10 years in prison for the images, which included masochistic and sadistic pictures.
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Government authorities managed to identify some of the underage victims.
Simons used Internet services (including the Free6 website) to “knowingly receive and knowingly distribute” child porn, according to court records.
The convicted felon is free on $50,000 bail, but Carter ordered him to surrender to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons by noon on Sept. 27.
The judge also asked that officials house Simons, who was born in 1948, at a federal facility in Southern California so he can be close to family members.
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CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.