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Man gets three years for child porn
From the Attorney General’s Office:
A Richmond man was sentenced to three years imprisonment, plus an additional seven years of suspended time, for possession of child pornography. Upon his release he will be required to complete two years of supervised probation and register as a sex offender in any jurisdiction in which he lives, works, or attends school. Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli made the announcement [yesterday] after Kevin Algood, 42, of Church Hill, was sentenced by Richmond Circuit Court Judge Bradley B. Cavedo.
Administrators of a photo sharing website detected Algood uploading images of child pornography to his account and notified the Southern Virginia Internet Crimes against Children (SoVa ICAC) Task Force. The case was then referred to the Richmond Police Department, a SoVa ICAC Task Force affiliate agency, for further investigation.
Richmond Police detectives obtained and executed a search warrant for Algood’s residence. A subsequent forensic examination of the computer equipment seized during the search confirmed the presence of hundreds of child pornography files depicting prepubescent children as young as six years old engaged in sexually explicit conduct.
“By seeking out, possessing, and distributing sexually abusive images and videos of children, Algood played an active role in perpetuating the abuse of the victims depicted in this vile material,” said Cuccinelli. “My office will continue its work to fight the scourge of child pornography and to protect Virginia’s most vulnerable citizens.”
Virginia Assistant Attorney General K. Bryn Swartz prosecuted the case on behalf of the commonwealth. The case was investigated by the SoVa ICAC Task Force and the Richmond Police Department.
Sick fucker. What kind of weirdo thinks this is hot. Fortunately it doesn’t sound like he was producing any of it.
Three years is too harsh, in my opinion. We should have resources for people like this to deal with what may well be innate feelings. Currently there are few open avenues for them to exist in society.
@3 – if that’s your kids this freak is looking at I doubt you’d feel the same. Some poor kids are getting traumatized for life so these bastards can get off. If it were me judging, I’d have made sure this guy never saw daylight or another kid again.
@4, Alex, I generally cannot stand you, however, I agree with you on this score 100%
@5 – a broken clock is right twice a day. (In this case the broken clock would be you because I’m right all day long :-P)
I cannot speak for @3, but they raise a good point. If it was up to me any sexual crime related to children would range from life imprisonment to death penalty, but the reality is most people who commit these crimes will be free citizens again in a society that is not set up to give them much support after release. So while we can beat our chests and say what we would do to them, that does absolutely nothing with addressing the realities and protecting our children. From what I understand this usually isn’t a decision someone makes to just like child porn, its innate as the above poster said, so simply saying they can’t do it and giving them jail time doesn’t really work. There is no alternative outlet for that taboo urge in our society, so if we just keep throwing jail time at it, odds are many will continue to become repeat offenders, because without long term and comprehensive care to address the root psychological issues, they just can’t help themselves if possible jail time is the only deterrent. Again, let me be clear, I’m all for just killing them or giving life imprisonment, but that isn’t reality, so we need to realize if we are too scared as a society to hand out real punishments for serious crimes, then we need to follow up the short jail time holidays we give, with comprehensive care to ensure they don’t offend again.
This man had hundreds of images on his camera. It doesn’t sound like he is fighting the urge at all. I think the limits of civilized behavior dictate that as adults we cannot act on every urge we have. This is more than just a deviant preference – it is also about self control and how to functionally participate in society.
If this man were trying (and failing) to resist his urges, he could have sought pyschiatric help and he could have stopped downloading porn. I do not accept “irresistible urges” as an excuse.
You are thinking you can analyze him using your normal mind and world perspective as a frame of reference. These people’s brain’s don’t work the same as ours, so simply saying “pull up your boot straps and fight those urges like a man” doesn’t work, jail time doesn’t work. They aren’t going to voluntarily seek help. So then we have two options 1) punish them so severely we don’t have to ever deal with them being reintroduced into society (this won’t happen unfortunately) or 2) follow up their jail sentences with on-going, life-long support to address the root psychological issues. Jail time alone isn’t enough deterrent. Treating them as lepers in society and having neighbors watch them like a hawk is fine, but the problem is they move, or the neighbors move, and then people have no idea who they are living near, so after a while no one is watching them anymore, and without support they will re-offend. You don’t have to accept it as an excuse, I don’t view it as an excuse that gets them off the hook, but it is a fact that we have to address if we want to stop these people from doing it again or worse stepping up their crimes to actual molestation.
Thanks Bret for your rational point of view. Psych help is too expensive, sometimes even if your insurance covers it, to seek. This is a psychological disease, as hard as it may be to wrap our heads around that fact. Jail time is pretty useless as a deterrent…if you really want to protect kids, let’s look for the real solutions. How about taking the tax payer money used to send these people to jail, and putting it into psych help, and community support and enforcement to help keep these individuals on track, and help them get healthy.