Kansas City Man Sentenced to 10 Years in Prison for Receiving Child Pornography

KANSAS CITY, MO—Tammy Dickinson, United States Attorney for the Western District of Missouri, announced that a Kansas City, Missouri man was sentenced in federal court today for attempting to receive child pornography over the Internet.

Russell S. Nicholson, 36, of Kansas City, was sentenced by U.S. Chief District Judge Fernando J. Gaitan to 10 years in federal prison without parole.

Nicholson pleaded guilty on August 3, 2012. He was arrested after an officer with the Independence, Missouri Police Department, who was investigating child pornography offenses in an undercover capacity in conjunction with an officer with the Salem, Oregon Police Department, identified his computer as sharing files that contained child pornography.

Nicholson was using a peer-to-peer file-sharing program to share nine videos of child pornography with other users via the Internet. The videos depicted minors engaged in sexual intercourse and other sexual activity with adults and with other minors. The child victims in these videos were as young as three years old. Some of the videos depicted prepubescent children being subjected to penetration or attempted penetration by adult males or being subjected to other sadistic or violent sexual activity.

Officers executed a search warrant at Nicholson’s apartment and seized three computers, which were found to contain evidence of child pornography. Nicholson admitted that he threw into a dumpster the laptop he had with him at the time he heard about the search warrant. He said he did this because he knew there was child pornography on the computer.

Nicholson admitted that he had been downloading child pornography over the Internet for approximately 10 years.

This case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Katharine Fincham. It was investigated by the FBI Cybercrime Task Force; the Independence, Missouri Police Department; and the Salem, Oregon Police Department.

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.usdoj.gov/psc. For more information about Internet safety education, please visit www.usdoj.gov/psc and click on the tab “Resources.”

This news release, as well as additional information about the office of the United States Attorney for the Western District of Missouri, is available online at http://www.justice.gov/usao/mow/index.html.