Potomac Man Sentenced To Over 7 Years In Prison For Receiving Child Pornography

Greenbelt, Maryland – U.S. District Judge Paul W. Grimm sentenced Marion Lee Martin, Jr., age 58, of Potomac, Maryland, today to 85 months in prison followed by a lifetime of supervised release for receiving child pornography. Judge Grimm ordered that upon his release from prison, Martin must register as a sex offender in the place where he resides, where he is an employee, and where he is a student, under the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA).

The sentence was announced by United States Attorney for the District of Maryland Rod J. Rosenstein; Special Agent in Charge Stephen E. Vogt of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and Chief J. Thomas Manger of the Montgomery County Police Department.

According to his plea agreement, in January 2013, Martin uploaded files to his internet cloud account which depicted real children engaged in sexually explicit conduct.  On May 8, 2013, a search warrant was executed at his residence and a large number of digital devices and removable media, some of which contained child pornography, were seized.  Martin admitted that he had been collecting images of children since approximately 1977, and his sexual interest was in girls, including the ages of nine to 11.

Martin also told law enforcement that he worked in a photo lab at a local CVS store and would also copy, for his own personal collection, images of children that customers would drop off for processing. Evidence seized during the May 8 search revealed video files depicting prepubescent and pubescent girls taken in a CVS store.

On October 30, 2013, Martin admitted to law enforcement that he had been using his cell phone to take videos of girls, clothed, at the store where he worked; and that he had bought a new laptop and cell phone since the May 2013 search of his home.  A second search warrant was executed at his home in January 2014.  Three laptops, five tablets, seven cameras, 24 memory cards, a Google Glass device and other digital media storage devices were seized.

Martin had at least tens of thousands of images and videos of child pornography and child erotica images and videos stored on the digital devices and removable media seized from both searches of his home.  Some of the images and videos depicted real children engaged in sexually explicit conduct.

The case was investigated by the FBI-led Maryland Child Exploitation Task Force, created in 2010 to combat the sexual exploitation of children, with members from 10 state and federal law enforcement agencies.

This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse. Led by the United States Attorneys' Offices and the Criminal Division's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state, and local resources to locate, apprehend, and prosecute individuals who sexually exploit children, and to identify and rescue victims. For more information about Project Safe Childhood, please visit www.justice.gov/psc.  For more information about internet safety education, please visit www.justice.gov/psc and click on the "resources" tab on the left of the page.            

United States Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein commended the FBI and Montgomery County Police Department for their work in the investigation.  Mr. Rosenstein thanked Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicolas Mitchell, who prosecuted the case.