Kenneth Scott Casey, 62, who was found guilty of sexual exploitation of a child during a trial in September last year, was sentenced to a minimum of 30 days in jail during a hearing at the Summit County Justice Center on Monday afternoon.
Casey was arrested in 2015 after hundreds of pornographic images involving children were found on his personal computer. He was living in Frisco at the time of the discovery.
Casey’s ex-girlfriend discovered the images on his computer a few days after their breakup in June 2015, according to the arrest affidavit. The two were living together for about three months before the breakup, and the woman told police that that she stumbled onto the photos while trying to remove her own personal files and photos from Casey’s computer. She provided the Frisco Police Department with the computer and a backup flash drive she created of the photos.
Investigators with the Frisco Police Department handed the computer over to Paul Anderson, a former special agent with the Department of Homeland Security, who performed the data recovery on the hard drives. During his testimony at trial, Anderson said he discovered more than 500 “notable images” and 19 videos of individuals under 18-years-old engaged in sexual acts. Additionally, Anderson said he identified 10 documents that helped to establish Casey’s ownership and control over the computer.
In a trial that largely relied on circumstance — as there was no hard proof that Casey knew the illicit material was on his computer or that he ever looked at it — more ancillary arguments surrounding ownership, chain of custody of the computer and metadata became the determining factors for the jury. As jurors considered the origins of the computer — it was homemade with no identifiable markings — metadata recovered from Anderson provided some much needed insight on the presumptive timeline of the computer’s custody over the last several years.
Anderson discovered copies of several personal checks on the computer, helping to tie it to Casey as far back as at least 2010. The child pornography was created on one of the computer’s hard drives as far back as 2005, and as recently as 2012. The metadata also revealed that the illicit files were accessed as recently as 2014.
Ultimately the jury worked their way through the heavily technical testimony, and unanimously found Casey guilty of sexual exploitation of a child, a Class-4 felony.
At Casey’s sentencing hearing on Monday, Chief Judge Mark Thompson sentenced Casey to 90 days in jail, though 60 of those days are suspended, meaning that Casey will only serve the whole 90 days if he violates the conditions of his sentencing. The conditions of the sentencing bar Casey from accessing any pornographic websites, chat rooms or dating sites — or from any contact with children, unless his probation officer and court approve further contact. Additionally, Casey was forced to pay almost $7,000 in fines.
Casey must also complete six years in Colorado’s Sex Offender Intensive Supervision Program. The sex offender program could include a number of different types of supervision including daily contact between the offender and the probation officer, a monitored curfew, home and work visitations, drug and alcohol screenings, treatment referrals and monitoring and more. District Attorney Bruce Brown noted that if Casey fails the program, he would face up to six years in prison.
“This type of offense is one where the children directly victimized aren’t the children around him, but the children in those photographs,” said Brown. “It’s very harmful to children to be in sexual scenarios and erotic poses because once those pictures hit the internet, which is how Mr. Casey got his hands on that material, it never goes away. They’re not just victimized by Casey, but by thousands of other pedophiles trolling the internet looking for this material.”