Security News: Registered Sex Offender Sentenced for Transporting Child Sexual Abuse Material

Source: United States Department of Justice Criminal Division

An Oklahoma man was sentenced today to 40 years in prison for transporting child pornography that he produced of an 18-month-old infant and for being a person required to register as a sex offender who committed a felony offense involving a minor.

According to court documents, Matthew Alan McNair, 41, of Tulsa, was in Indiana in the summer of 2017 when he utilized an electronic device to take sexually explicit photographs of an 18-month-old infant. McNair took multiple sexually explicit photos of the infant on at least three different dates that summer. After taking those photographs, McNair transported the images on his phone back to Oklahoma, where he was living at the time, and uploaded them to his cloud account. At the time of this offense, McNair was required to register as a sex offender based upon his 1999 conviction in Illinois for attempted criminal sexual assault. 

Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Polite, Jr. of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and U.S. Attorney Clifford D. Johnson for the Northern District of Indiana made the announcement.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), along with the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation (OSBI) Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force and the Tulsa Police Department Cyber Crimes Unit, investigated the case.

Trial Attorney Austin M. Berry of the Criminal Division’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section and Assistant U.S. Attorneys Emily A. Morgan and Jennifer Chang for the Northern District of Indiana prosecuted the case.

This case is brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative to combat the epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice. Led by U.S. Attorneys’ Offices and the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, 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 http://www.justice.gov/psc.