Ex-sheriff guilty of child porn possession, confined to home
Retired Pierce County Sheriff Mark French, initially charged with seven counts of possession, pleaded guilty to one felony count yesterday in an agreement with prosecutors and was sentenced by Superior Court Judge Bryan E. Chushcoff.
The case arose from an international child porn investigation ranging from Dallas to Russia.
"I was on the Internet and viewed some photographs of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct, and the images were automatically downloaded on the temporary memory of my computer, and I knew that would happen," French said in a statement filed in court. "I am obviously sorry this incident has occurred."
French, 55, a native of Shreveport, La., who spent his entire 30-year law enforcement career with the sheriff's office, was booked, fingerprinted and photographed in a gray jail uniform before being released.
He will serve his sentence with his wife at a friend's home because his houseboat has only a cellular telephone that is incompatible with the monitoring system, defense lawyer Donald W. Winskill said.
French may leave only for medical appointments and other approved trips, and violations could mean jail time or other punishment.
He also must serve 12 months on probation, pay $710 in fines and court costs, provide a DNA sample and continue to undergo counseling which he began last year.
As a first-time offender, he faced zero to 90 days in jail.
French was sheriff from June 13, 1997, to June 30, 2000, and was credited with improving community relations, ethics training and efficiency. He retired after spending spent the next nine months as interim executive director of the county's Law Enforcement Support Agency.
The felony conviction does not affect his $65,000-a-year pension but would likely keep him from returning to law enforcement work, something Winskill said French had never planned to do.
Under the plea bargain, prosecutors dropped an assertion that French acted out of a sexual motivation, sparing him from having to register as a sex offender.
According to documents filed by prosecutors, his laptop computer contained more than 100 sexual images of children, from babies to preteen girls and boys.
Once the images are removed from the laptop, French will get it back but will be barred from access to the Internet until his psychologist grants approval.
Tacoma police seized the computer April 24, 2003, in a raid on French's houseboat, one of 12 sites in the area that were searched following a two-year investigation led by Dallas police into a Russian-based child pornography Web site.
The Tacoma-area raids were based on information from Dallas on the use of a credit card verification service to access the porn site, investigators said, adding that French's name appeared 22 times in the verification service's database in a 21/2-month period in 2001.