Mascoutah Man Sentenced for Enticement of a Minor and Distribution of Child Pornography

A Mascoutah man, Jeremy S. Beasley, 22, was sentenced on May 31, 2012, for enticement of a minor (count one) and distribution of child pornography (count two), the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Illinois, Stephen R. Wigginton, announced today.

Jeremy S. Beasley, 22, of Mascoutah, Illinois, was sentenced on May 31, 2012 to a total of 120 months’ imprisonment, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Illinois, Stephen R. Wigginton, announced today. The sentence consists of 120 months’ imprisonment on both counts, to run concurrently. Beasley was also ordered to serve 20 years’ supervised release on both counts, to run concurrently; fined $500 on each count, for a total fine of $1,000; and ordered to pay a $200 special assessment. Beasley pled guilty to the two-count information on February 28, 2012.

The violation charged in count one occurred on September 6, 2010, when the defendant, posing as a 16-year-old boy on MySpace, asked an individual whom he believed to be a 14-year-old girl to send him sexually explicit images of herself, to include full frontal nudes and close ups of her genital area.

The violation charged in count two occurred on August 11, 2010, when an officer participating in an Internet undercover operation downloaded 18 images and/or videos containing child pornography from what was later determined to be the defendant’s computer at the residence he shared with his parents in Masoutah, Illinois.

Beasley provided a voluntary statement to law enforcement officers in which he admitted recently using a file sharing program to download child pornography to his computer. Beasley stated that his file sharing account was set to share and that he knew that other individuals could access and download the images of child pornography from his computer. Beasley said that he traded and/or distributed child pornography with 15 to 20 friends. Finally, Beasley stated anything on the computer seized from his residence, from which the files had been downloaded, belonged to him, and that no one else used this computer.

This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice. 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, as well as to identify and rescue victims. For more information about Project Safe Childhood, please visit www.projectsafechildhood.gov.

The case was investigated by the Wheaton, Illinois Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Metro East Cyber Crimes and Analysis Task Force. The case was assigned to Assistant United States Attorney Angela Scott.