This story comes courtesy of the Huffington Post, which describes the dire situation of a 43-year-old socialite from Texas who was recently sentenced by a judge to 14 years in prison for trading and shipping child pornography. Law enforcement discovered a “massive cache” of child porn, as HuffPo puts it – 4,000 images on the hard drive of her computer, collected over 13 years of daily downloading while the woman’s husband was at work.
She originally faced 20 years but the judge reduced the sentence because of “pretty severe” mental health issues.
The original local source describes “so much child pornography” that the woman, 41 at the time, apparently had difficulty monitoring what she had downloaded and shared since 1999. Law enforcement agents accessed the images through the file-sharing programs she used, which allowed them to gather evidence against her.
“When it comes to the heinous crime of child pornography,” says the broadcast reporter on WFAA News, “almost all of the offenders are men. Tonight, it’s a woman…” As surprising as it is to some that a woman was arrested and convicted of serious offenses involving child porn, it’s not surprising that the woman’s guilty plea resulted in a lengthy prison sentence.
There’s no doubt that people accused of child porn offenses make unsympathetic defendants – there were likely very few who came to this woman’s defense. But that’s exactly why it’s important that somebody does, like a defense lawyer, who will put the government to its proof, no matter how unsavory the facts of the case may be.