Published: September 15, 2009 12:00 am      

Former area resident gets prison for child porn

A former Sharon Springs resident has been sentenced to prison for possessing child pornography, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of New York of the Department of Justice said in a media release.

John C. Hotaling, 49, of Gallupville, was sentenced Thursday to 6½ years in prison and ordered to serve a lifetime term of supervised release, U.S. Attorney Andrew T. Baxter said in the release.

Hotaling also was prohibited from having unsupervised contact with minors and was required to participate in a sex offender program and to register with the state Sex Offender Registry.

Hotaling, whose case was heard before Judge Norman A. Mordue in Federal Court in Albany, had pleaded guilty Feb. 5 to one count of indictment charging him with possession of child pornography. In a statement with his plea agreement, Hotaling admitted using America Online, including wire transmissions between New York and Virginia and other factors in the case.

On Jan. 18, 2005, a state search warrant was executed at Hotaling’s residence at 148 France St. in Sharon Springs, and a computer was taken, the release said.

A forensic examination of this computer revealed that Hotaling possessed computer images of six known minor females that he had digitally altered, the release said. The heads of the known minor females had been “cut” from their original nonpornographic image and “pasted” over the heads of nude or partially nude females engaged in sexually explicit conduct. About 300 images were recovered.

The government wasn’t able to determine whose bodies were in the altered images or that the bodies were of minors, the release said, but the bodies depicted belong to actual individuals and are not computer generated. Hotaling created the altered images using a computer software program, and he obtained the bodies depicted in the altered images utilizing the Internet and AOL.

The case was investigated by the state police at Cobleskill, Schoharie County Child Protective Services and the Capital Region Cyber Predator Task Force of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.