SPRINGFIELD, MO—Tammy Dickinson, United States Attorney for the Western District of Missouri, announced today that a Nevada, Mo., man has been sentenced in federal court for receiving and distributing child pornography.

James D. Stevens, 50, of Nevada, Mo., was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Douglas Harpool on Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2014, to 12 years in federal prison without parole. The court also ordered Stevens to forfeit to the government a laptop computer, a tablet computer, various hard drives, nearly a thousand CDs and DVDs and other electronic memory devices, all of which were used to commit the offense.

On April 26, 2014, Stevens pleaded guilty to receiving and distributing child pornography. According to court documents, law enforcement officers identified Stevens’s computer as repeatedly distributing and receiving numerous videos and images of child pornography. On six separate occasions during their investigation, law enforcement officers received videos containing child pornography from Stevens’s computer through a file-sharing program, with up to 10 videos of child pornography received on each occasion. The videos contained images of children, from eight to 14 years old, being sexually exploited, molested, raped and abused. Additional videos of child pornography were discovered on Stevens’s computers after they were seized and examined.

This case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Patrick Carney. It was investigated by the FBI and the Southwest Missouri Cyber Crimes Task Force.

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.”