He was opearting a file-sharing program out of a hotel room.
A Frederick man was sentenced Thursday in US District Court in Baltimore for operating a computer file-sharing program involving child pornography. Robert Lee Ingram, 58, was given 10 years in prison for possession of child pornography. When he gets out, Ingram will be put on lifetime supervised release, and must register as a sex offender.
"This is one of these very disturbing cases involving child pornography," says US Attorney for Maryland Rod Rosenstein. What made it disturbing was that Ingram was sentenced in 2007 in Frederick County Circuit Court to 10 years in prison for 3rd-degree sex offense involving a pre-pubescent girl, says Rosenstein. Nine years and nine months of that sentence was suspended. A few years later, Ingram was operating a file-sharing program from a hotel room in Frederick. "This is a defendant who obviously hadn't learned his lesson after a prior conviction for child sex offense, and was still posing a threat to the children in our community," Rosenstein says.
The US Attorney's Office says Ingram told officers, who arrived at his hotel room, that he had set up the file-sharing program. An undercover agent was able to download images of sexual abuse of minors. When officers previewing the images on Ingram's computer found the child pornography images, they stopped, and got a search warrant. They seized his computer and a hard drive, where Ingram stored images from his computer.
Authorities say Ingram's computer and hard drive had video depicting pre-pubescent children engaging in sexually explicit conduct, including sadism and masochism, and other acts of violence.
Rosenstein hopes the stiff sentence for Ingram sends a message to citizens to avoid downloading, collecting and sharing images of child pornography from the Internet, which is against federal law.
And if they do, they can't hide it. "We have the ability to track you down," Rosenstein says. "And that's something people don't always appreciate. I think some of these pedophiles believe that they can just secretly download pornography through their computer without the government finding out about it."
Rosenstein thanked the FBI, Maryland State Police Computer Crimes Unit, Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, Frederick County Sheriff's Office, Frederick County State's Attorney's Office, and the Pennsylvania State Police for their assistance in this investigation.
