A 72-year-old Whiteford man has been sentenced to five years in federal prison after pleading guilty to possessing and distributing child pornography.
Michael Francis Chaney was sentenced in Baltimore Friday by U.S. District Judge Frederick Motz. Chaney will also be placed on five years supervised release when he leaves prison and will be required to register as a sex offender, according to the Maryland U.S. Attorney's Office, which announced the sentence.
Chaney pleaded guilty in May to one count of distributing child pornography and one count of possessing child pornography, according to court records.
According to stipulated facts in Chaney's plea agreement, over the course of several years he had used several email addresses to both send and receive images and videos of child pornography via the Internet.
An investigation confirmed that IP addresses to upload images on March 27, 2012 and Sept. 24, 2013 "resolved to the defendant's residence in Harford County," a search warrant was executed on Feb. 6, 2015, according to the statement of facts. Agents seized computers, flash drives and an external hard drive.
"Forensic analysis of the above referenced items revealed that all had images depicting minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct stored on them," according to the statement of facts.
There were approximately 1,941 videos and 23,381 images of child pornography seized, "which had been downloaded from various websites on the Internet, and the defendant [Chaney] had actively traded these images and videos of child pornography with other individuals via the Internet," according to the statement of facts.
"He [Chaney] pleaded guilty, went before the judge and received a mandatory five years that was called for," Chaney's attorney, Joseph P. Meadows of Bel Air, said Monday. "That's what the prosecution offered, and Mr. Chaney accepted a plea."
The case against Chaney 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, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.
U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein commended the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations office in Baltimore and the Maryland State Police for their work in the Chaney investigation. Asst. U.S. Attorney Judson T. Mihok prosecuted the case.