Man pleads guilty to child porn
Published 1:34 pm Wednesday, April 18, 2012
An Albert Lea man on Wednesday pleaded guilty in federal court in Minneapolis to possessing at least 5,700 images and 370 videos of child pornography.
Jesse Jeff Stewart, 33, pleaded guilty to one count of receipt of child pornography and one count of possession of child pornography in front of U.S. District Court Judge David S. Doty.
The images and videos reportedly included minors under the age of 12 and featured “sadistic or masochistic” conduct, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
The release states the items were found after a search of a house at 1109 Lincoln Ave. on Dec. 2, 2009. The photos and videos were found on four computers and eight CDs.
At the time of the search, the residence was owned by Stewart’s father, but ownership of the house was turned over to Stewart in August 2011 following his father’s death, according to the Freeborn County Assessor’s Office.
U.S. authorities were alerted to Stewart after an investigation by the German federal police.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the police had been investigating a computer network that featured child pornography and found that multiple Internet addresses in the United States had downloaded pornographic images. When they found this out, they contacted American authorities, who ultimately led them to Stewart.
Stewart faces a mandatory minimum of five years in prison and a potential maximum penalty of 20 years.
His sentencing date has not yet been scheduled.
The case is the result of an investigation by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations and the German federal police.
Did you know?
The U.S. Justice Department is funding a study concerning the correlation between involvement in child pornography and the hands-on sexual abuse of children. A 2008 study published in the Journal of Family Violence found that up to 80 percent of federal inmates incarcerated for possession, receipt or distribution of child pornography also admitted to hands-on sexual abuse of children, ranging from touching to rape.