During a stellar, 25-year career in the U.S. Army, Jorge Albert Swank of Aliso Viejo served in Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Desert Storm and Operation Just Cause.
Swank–a graduate of Trinity University and a onetime congressional liaison for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services–received numerous awards for his brave patriotism in the military.
But Swank, who was once featured in the Orange County Register, also had a secret: he collected and stored more than a thousand images depicting child pornography from the Internet.
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In January 2011, a federal grand jury in Southern California indicted Swank on three felony counts.
The onetime Army major confessed in October 2012 and won a reduction in the charges by agreeing to plead guilty.
A federal probation office reviewed Swank's crimes and recommended a sentencing range of 78 to 97 months in prison. Federal prosecutors inside the Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse in Santa Ana pushed for 78 months of incarceration.
But Swank, who is married and a father, thought that he had two major mitigating factors that earned him nothing worse than probation: he claims he'd been sexually molested by a family member when he was a child, and the strength of his military service.
U.S. District Court Judge Josephine Staton Tucker surely took Swank's arguments into account, but she also likely considered evidence that this defendant collected the illicit materials for more than a decade (often at work) and repeatedly skipped sex offender counseling sessions.
This month, Tucker sentenced Swank to a term of 37 months.
When he returns to society from prison, he'll be forced to undergo 10 years of supervised probation.
Federal prosecutors wanted Swank to be immediately taken into custody by U.S. marshals at the Jan. 18 sentencing hearing, but Tucker gave him until noon today to surrender.
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.
Jorge Albert Swank was my platoon leader at Storck Barracks in West Germany from 1987 to 1988 while we were with 3rd Platoon Delta company 1st Battalion 6th infantry (mechanized) – this is shocking
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