Jacksonville, Florida - United States Attorney A. Lee Bentley, III announced today that a federal jury, in Jacksonville, has found Richard Dale Brooks (55, Cocoa) guilty of receiving videos of child pornography and possessing an image of child pornography using the Internet. Brooks faces a minimum of five years, up to twenty years in federal prison on each of the five receipt charges, and up to ten years’ imprisonment on the possession charge. After the return of the jury’s verdict, Brooks was remanded to the custody of the United States Marshals Service to await his sentencing hearing, which is scheduled for Sept. 15, 2014.
According to testimony and evidence introduced during the trial, during 2012, a Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office law enforcement officer identified videos depicting child pornography over the Internet as coming from a host computer using Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that traced back to Brooks’s residence in Jacksonville, Florida. On Aug. 2, 2012, a search warrant was executed at this residence. Law enforcement officers entered the residence and recovered five computers and several other computer media. During an interview, Brooks told detectives that he was the primary user of the computer, that he used a file-sharing program to download video files of adult pornography, and that he has also received child pornography via the file-sharing program. A subsequent forensic analysis of Brooks’s computers revealed that he had at least 245 files depicting children engaged in sexually explicit conduct and that he had compact discs and a DVD containing the same.
This case was investigated by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations, the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, and other agencies that comprise the North Florida Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. It was prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Kelly S. Karase.
It is another case 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.
Source: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the United States Attorneys
