St. Petersburg Man Sentenced to 97 Months for Receipt and Possession of Child Pornography

TAMPA, FL—U.S. Attorney Robert E. O'Neill announces that U.S. District Judge Virginia M. Hernandez Covington today sentenced Patrick McGraw (64, St. Petersburg) to eight years and eight months in federal prison for receipt and possession of child pornography, followed by a lifetime of supervised release. The court also ordered McGraw to forfeit a Hewlitt Packard Computer and a Western Digital hard drive, which he used in committing the child pornography offenses. McGraw pled guilty to six counts of receipt of child pornography and one count of possession of child pornography on December 20, 2010.

According to court documents, in 2006, law enforcement in Italy identified two child pornography websites which offered child pornography videos for sale. In late 2006, Italian authorities arrested the operator of the sites and obtained the e-mail addresses of those who had purchased child pornography from the websites. The Italian authorities forwarded this customer information to various law enforcement agencies where the customers resided.

McGraw was noted to be a customer of the child pornography websites, and his e-mail address was provided by the Italian authorities to law enforcement in the United States, as were e-mails that McGraw had sent to the operator of the websites when buying child pornography. A federal search warrant for McGraw's Pinellas County home was obtained and executed on September 25, 2008. McGraw was shown the e-mails in which he ordered child pornography and he admitted to sending them and to ordering the child pornography. A forensic search was performed on McGraw's desktop computer as well as on an external hard drive. McGraw was found to possess over 5577 files of child pornography, including over 1000 videos of children engaging in sexually explicit conduct and images of children being sexually assaulted by adult men. McGraw kept detailed records regarding how many videos of child pornography he had ordered and the prices he paid for the videos.

The videos and images that were located on McGraw’s computer were sent to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). NCMEC identified 194 images from 17 different child victims, and a total of 45 video files were identified from six different series of child victims. Six videos that McGraw had ordered from the specific child pornography websites were also located on his computer.

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 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, and to identify and rescue victims. For more information about Project Safe Childhood, please visit www.projectsafechildhood.gov.

This case was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Innocent Images Task Force. It was prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Amanda C. Kaiser.