Man pleads guilty to receiving child porn

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – A 20-year-old Norfolk, Va., man pleaded guilty Wednesday to a federal charge of receiving child pornography over the Internet.

Peter Johns faces a five to 20 years in federal prison, a $250,000 fine and a potential life term of supervised release. The plea agreement also requires Johns to forfeit his computer.

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He has been in custody since his arrest on Oct. 3 in Norfolk.

According to court documents, while conducting an undercover operation, a Naval Criminal Investigative Service agent identified an Internet Protocol address that was using the Internet to share files depicting child pornography. Subpoenaed documents later revealed that the Internet service account for this IP address belonged to a home in Jacksonville.

On April Wednesday, law enforcement officers executed a federal search warrant at the home, and agents learned that Johns had previously lived there in a camper trailer, but had recently moved.

During the search of the trailer, agents said they found a laptop computer that belonged to Johns.

Later that day, agents located and interviewed Johns, and he said he had lived in the camper trailer at the home in July 2010, and then again from Thanksgiving 2010 through April 2011.

Johns admitted, among other things, to using certain terms and specific ages to search for child pornography using an Internet file sharing program, prosecutors said. He said that sometimes after watching the videos, he would realize that what he was doing was wrong and deleted the files, according to prosecutors.

Subsequent forensic analysis of his laptop computer recovered at least 13 videos and five images depicting children engaged in sexually explicit conduct, prosecutors said.