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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowU.S. Judge Robert Miller Jr. sentenced an Elkhart man to 326 months in prison and a lifetime of supervised release after his guilty plea to sexually exploiting children.
John Harris, 46, received the sentence on Monday, culminating a process that began with a September 2010 investigation into the man’s conduct as part of a nationwide initiative combating child sexual exploitation, known as Project Safe Childhood.
Undercover law enforcement used a publicly available peer-to-peer file sharing program to download from a user multiple videos of children engaged in sexually explicit activity. An administrative subpoena issued to the user’s Internet Service Provider led to the conclusion that Harrison was the subscriber, and a search warrant for his home led authorities to discover child pornography on his computer.
In his plea agreement, Harrison admitted that in August 2006 he induced and enticed a girl to engage in sexually explicit conduct so that he could take photographs using his cell phone. He admitted that the girl was a minor and that he texted those images to another minor girl. The plea also involved production of child pornography relating to a third minor girl. Harris faked incompetence about the situation and used the Internet to superimpose faces of acquaintances on top of nude bodies – factors that also impacted the sentence imposed.
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