A Los Angeles County man caught collecting and distributing child pornography–including images of infants–admitted guilt this week inside Orange County's Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse.
Undercover FBI agents roaming the Internet and using peer-to-peer software downloaded 14 child porn images from John Eric Goldman's computer in May 2011.
One photograph depicted a 12-year-old girl performing oral sex on an adult male; other images were titled “toddler” and “infant,” according to court records.
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A raid discovered Goldman stored more than 600 illegal images on his computer and a federal grand jury indicted him in December 2012.
Goldman signed a formal guilty plea in May with Assistant United States Attorney Lana Morton-Owens, a member of the Department of Justice's Violent and Organized Crime Section in LA.
According to the plea, the mandatory minimum punishment is 60 months in prison plus various sex offender restrictions such as staying at least 100 feet away from schools.
But the final decision about Goldman's punishment is up to U.S. District Court Judge Andrew J. Guilford, who ordered a February 2014 sentencing hearing.
Goldman, who was born in 1966, remains free from custody on $25,000 bail.
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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.