Greenville Man Sentenced for Child Pornography Offense

A Greenville man was sentenced on April 17, 2014, on one count of attempt to access with intent to view visual depictions of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Illinois, Stephen R. Wigginton, announced today. Terry L. Adcock, 65, Greenville, Illinois, was sentenced to a term of 30 months in federal prison, to be followed by a 10 year term of supervised release, fined $3,000, and ordered to pay a $100 special assessment. Adcock also forfeited the two computers that were used in the attempt to access the illegal images. In addition, upon his release from prison, Adcock must register as a sex offender as a condition of his supervised release. Adcock had been detained since he entered his guilty plea on January 16, 2014.

Before imposing sentence, Chief Judge David R. Herndon noted that Adcock was charged with a serious offense because child pornography “is not a victimless crime.” He stated that the children contained in these images and/or videos of child pornography suffer from knowing that people are looking at their images and/or videos over and over again. He also noted that, in past victim impact statements submitted on behalf of some children depicted in child pornography currently found on the Internet, some noted that, when an individual catches their eye, they have to wonder if this person is looking at him or her because that individual has seen he or she depicted in one of these images and/or videos depicting their abuse that is on the Internet. He suggested that individuals who look at child pornography need to think about this. Specifically, he suggested that, maybe when someone has an inclination to look at child pornography, that individual stop to realize that they are not looking at “nothing” or “inanimate objects” but at “people.” He stated that, maybe when an individual thinks of that child as being aware that that individual is looking at that child and how that makes that child feel, then just maybe the inclination to look at child pornography will pass.

The charges resulted from an FBI nationwide investigation that revealed IP addresses that accessed a web forum known to contain links to images and/or videos of visual depictions of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct. The web forum listed a detailed description of the image and/or video file that a user could link to, with some of the descriptions of the images clearly indicating that the images and/or video vile involved a prepubescent minor. This investigation revealed that, between October and November 2011, an IP address assigned to Defendant Terry Adcock tried to access the web forum on five separate occasions.

On December 18, 2012, FBI special agents spoke with Adcock at his residence about the results of the investigation. Adcock admitted that he had been searching for and viewing images of child pornography on the Internet since he bought his first computer approximately 20 years prior and that he was interested in prepubescent girls between the ages of 10 and 12. He said that, by googling a search term commonly associated with child pornography, he would gain access to thousands of websites that contained child pornography, sometimes paying for access to certain websites. Adcock gave consent to the officers to search and seize, among other things, a Gateway desktop computer and a Dell Inspiron laptop computer. Adcock stated that he used these two computers to access and view child pornography.

This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative launched in 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.”

The case was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Springfield Child Exploitation Task Force (SCETF). The case was assigned to Assistant United States Attorney Angela Scott.