Horace Brown, age 38, of Clinton, pleaded guilty today to possession of child pornography.
Brown was identified as having uploaded child pornography to an undercover law enforcement website through an investigation conducted by the Attorney General’s offices of New Jersey and New York, as well as the Pennsylvania State Police, in February 2002.
The undercover website was patterned after a website with the same name that had been dismantled by law enforcement after it was discovered that the original website had contained images of child pornography. Undercover officers sent emails to previous paid subscribers of the website, including Brown, advising them
that the website had been shut down due to technical and financial problems and offering a free subscription to anyone who provided pornographic images to the site in an effort to rebuild it.
Brown was identified as being a subscriber to an email account that transmitted three images of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct to the undercover website.
On February 13, 2003, Brown was interviewed at his residence by two FBI Special Agents. Brown admitted that he had been a paying customer of the child pornography website that was the focus of this investigation and that he stored child pornography images on CD-ROMS which he created. Brown consented to Agents seizing CD-ROMS and his computer from his residence. A forensic review was conducted and revealed that Brown was in possession of numerous images of child pornography.
Brown faces a maximum sentence of imprisonment for 10 years, followed by a term of supervised release of not more than 3 years and a fine of $250,000.
U.S. District Judge Peter J. Messitte has scheduled sentencing for July 7, 2006 at 9:30 a.m.