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Former Marine Sergeant to serve five years on child porn charges Date published: 12/31/2008
BY ELLEN BILTZ
A former Marine Corps sergeant was convicted yesterday of 21 counts of possession of child pornography in Spotsylvania County Circuit Court. Sgt. Joshua Daniel Gougeon, 25, who had been the supply noncommissioned officer-in-charge for Marine Corps Recruiting Command at Quantico, pleaded guilty yesterday to all of the charges against him in exchange for a large portion of his sentence getting suspended. According to a plea agreement, Gougeon was sentenced to serve three years with two years and nine months suspended on each charge. That left him with a total active sentence of five years and three months to serve and a 57-year suspended sentence. He is also required to register as a sex offender. Prosecutor Matt Lowery said in court yesterday that he felt it was appropriate to recommend a sentence with a large amount of suspended time, even though the sentencing guidelines called for a higher sentence. "I don't think the guidelines are fair on this one, and that's why we went below," Lowery told Judge David H. Beck. He said the large number of charges made the sentencing guidelines spike. The 21 charges were representative of 21 electronic files that authorities found on Gougeon's computer that could clearly be identified as child pornography, the agreement states. Spotsylvania detectives began investigating Gougeon and ultimately searched his computer to find the files when they caught him exchanging the pornography on an online peer-to-peer site built for that purpose. Some of Gougeon's family sat in the courtroom yesterday and listened as he pleaded guilty to the 21 counts. His father and one of his nine siblings wrote letters to Beck about their support for Gougeon. Although the sentence had been previously agreed upon by Lowery and Gougeon's attorney, Atchuthan Sriskandarajah, the defendant asked to make a statement before sentencing. "I'm sorry for what I've done. I know it was wrong. I was glad that I did get to serve my country," he said. Ellen Biltz: 540/374-5424
Entrapment occurs when law enforcement put the suspect in a position where they have to do something that they normally would not do or lack the option not to break the law. The fact that this man went to a peer-to-peer sharing website and commited this crime multiple times shows that this was not entrapment. In cases where men are caught soliciting minors law enforcement often allows numerous encounters to occur which basically rules out the possibility of a defendent claiming entrapment.
what these people are doing is wrong and they should see jail time, but how they are being caught is very shady at times. Some of these, the police have initiated everything and the other end still goes to jail even if they said "Ok let's meet" and then didn't go meet, they said "Ok" as a joke. I was under the assumption that the bad guy had to initiate this, that the police could not go around doing that. It was considered an entrapment.............
... it's the possession. He was in possession of child pornography that resided on his personal computer. He allowed access to those files to anyone using the file sharing network. The technology basically makes part of your harddrive public to the internet. The detectives simply need to search for known files containing child pornography and see if they are available from a user with an IP address within their juristiction. No entrapment, no wiretap, just dumb pervert.
the government needs a court order to spy on Americans
on the telephone, but don't need it while on the internet
which you access via broadband which resides on the same
cable that brings phone and tv into your home? That seems
inconsistent.
Or is there an exception to the law for perverts?
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