Pennsylvania Man Pleads Guilty to Child Exploitation Charges

SPRINGFIELD, MA—A Reading, Pennsylvania man was convicted today in federal court of Sexual Exploitation of Children and Travel with Intent to Engage in Illicit Sexual Conduct.

United States Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz, Warren T. Bamford, Special Agent in Charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Boston Field Division, and Chief David J. LaBrie of the South Hadley Police Department, announced today that JONATHAN GREEN, age 27, of Reading, Pennsylvania, pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Michael A. Ponsor to one count of Sexual Exploitation of Children and one count of Travel with Intent to Engage in Illicit Sexual Conduct.

At today’s plea hearing, the prosecutor told the Court that had the case proceeded to trial, the government’s evidence would have proven that during the summer of 2007, the defendant met a 12-year-old South Hadley boy over the Internet and then persuaded the boy to engage in sexually explicit conduct for the purpose of producing a pornographic video. As part of the defendant's effort to persuade and direct the boy, the defendant produced and sent a pornographic video of himself to show the particular behavior the defendant wanted the boy to replicate in the boy's video. At the defendant's behest, the boy engaged in the conduct, produced the video, and sent the video to the defendant. On August 22, 2007, and shortly after receiving the pornographic video from the boy, the defendant traveled from Reading, Pennsylvania to South Hadley, Massachusetts with the intent to have sex with the boy. The defendant arrived in the middle of the night at the boy's house and took steps to avoid detection by the boy's parents. The defendant and the boy spent several hours together outdoors without the defendant following through on his plans before a neighbor called the police.

Judge Ponsor scheduled sentencing for March 25, 2010. GREEN faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years' imprisonment, a maximum of 60 years' imprisonment, to be followed by up to a lifetime of supervised release, and a $500,000 fine.

The case was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the South Hadley Police Department. It is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Alex J. Grant of Ortiz’s Springfield Branch Office.

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 the United States Attorneys’ Offices and the Criminal Divisions’s Child Exploitation 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 http://www.projectsafechildhood.gov.