Shenandoah Man Pleads Guilty to Producing Child Pornography

The United States Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania announced that a 37-year-old Schuylkill County man pleaded guilty today before Senior U.S. District Court Judge Edwin M. Kosik to producing child pornography.

According to United States Attorney Peter J. Smith, Jonathan Binns, of Shenandoah, admitted that he took sexually explicit photographs and videos of two minor children in 2010, uploaded the child pornography to a computer, and maintained the images on a thumb drive.

Binns was indicted by a federal grand jury in January 2011, following an investigation by Homeland Security Investigators, the FBI, the Pennsylvania State Police, detectives from the Lackawanna County District Attorney’s Office, and the Schuylkill County District Attorney’s Office.

Binns faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years in prison and a potential maximum sentence of 30 years in prison. Sentencing will be scheduled after a pre-sentence report is completed by the United States Probation Office. Binns remains detained in prison pending sentencing.

This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice. Led by United States Attorneys’ Offices and the Criminal Division’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS), Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state and local resources to better locate, apprehend and prosecute individuals who exploit children via the Internet, as well as to identify and rescue victims. For more information about Project Safe Childhood, please visit www.projectsafechildhood.gov.

The case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Francis P. Sempa.