Court rules child pornographer’s 120-year sentence is neither cruel nor unusual [View all]

[DonViejo]

By Scott Kaufman
Monday, April 14, 2014 9:40 EDT

Last week, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the constitutionality of “a 120-year sentence imposed on a defendant convicted of production, possession, and transportation of child pornography, in connection with his sexual molestation of a four-year-old boy.”

James Robert Cobler was arrested in 2012 after police discovered him sharing child pornography on a publicly available peer-to-peer network. After computer forensic investigators used Cobbler’s Internet Protocol Address to track the files’ origin to his grandparent’s home, they executed a search warrant.

According to the affidavit, “Cobler admitted to possessing numerous images of child pornography, and using the P2P file sharing software that was used during the above-referenced downloads.” He also “indicated that he was aware of the fact that the files, including the child pornography images that were in his ‘shared’ folder were available for download by others using the peer-to-peer network.”

The most serious charges against him, however, stemmed from his admission that he not only molested a four-year-old boy he regularly babysat, but that he had taken photographs of himself doing so. Police found a folder on Cobler’s computer labelled with the victim’s first name, and it contained 11 images and one video of him performing sex acts with the child.

more
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/04/14/court-rules-that-120-year-sentence-is-not-cruel-and-unusual-punishment/