As expected, registered sex offender Nicholas
James Needham was sentenced today to six years in state
prison for touching a 5-year-old boy's penis in an Orange mall restroom.
The Laguna Beach 28-year-old's sentence will be served concurrent with a nine-year term he received in federal court child pornography possession. The district court judge also imposed a lifetime sex offender tag on Needham.
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The afternoon of June 15, 2010, Needham walked into a men's restroom at
the Block of Orange, which has since been renamed the Outlets at Orange, where a child was using the facilities as his mother waited outside.
Needham cozied up
next to the boy he did not know, reached over the urinal and
touched the child's penis before leaving the restroom. The boy
immediately told his mother what happened, which led to an Orange Police
Department investigation that culminated with the arrest of Needham, who'd just moved to Orange.
A
search of Needham's residence produced an iPod containing thousands of
images and three videos of pornography featuring children from infancy
through early teens. He was originally charged in Orange County Superior
Court with child porn possession counts, but that part of the case was
later taken over by the U.S.
Attorney's office, which could push for a harsher punishment in federal
court.
Needham was in federal lockup in October when he pleaded guilty in absentia to one
felony count of lewd acts on a child under 14. He was convicted last month on the kiddie porn counts, and Judge Cormac Carney ruled sentences from both crimes would run concurrently.
Previous coverage:
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.