A 53-year-old Humboldt County juvenile corrections officer who pleaded guilty in June to charges of possessing child pornography was sentenced to five years (60 months) in prison last week.
Keith Monroe Wallace will begin serving his jail term immediately.
A press release from the U.S. Department of Justice on the day of his sentencing noted that Wallace “admitted to knowingly possessing 600 or more visual depictions of prepubescent minors or minors who had not attained 12 years of age engaging in sexually explicit conduct. The images included depictions of sadistic or masochistic conduct or other depictions of violence.”
The release said that at the time of his arrest, in February of this year, Wallace was employed by the Humboldt County Juvenile Probation Office as a supervising juvenile corrections officer at the Northern California Regional Facility in Eureka.
Humboldt County District Attorney Maggie Fleming, whose office reportedly assisted with the federal investigation into this crime, told the Eureka Times-Standard that her office was tipped off to the investigation in February of 2014.
The release noted that various computers and digital media storage devices that were seized during the search of Wallace’s residence contained videos and images depicting minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct and that Wallace was arrested the day of the search on his home.
In addition to his five-year sentence, Wallace was reportedly sentenced to a 10-year period of supervised release on a number of conditions, one of them requiring he register with the state sex offender registration agency.
This year, one of San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee’s political consultants, Enrique Pearce, 41, was allegedly found to be in possession of close to 5,000 images and videos of infants and young children being raped and sexually violated, including photos he allegedly took himself of young boys.
Over 600 of those images and videos reportedly included minors engaged in sexual conduct and many of those photos showed men hurting children.
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