Jacksonville couple convicted of child sexual exploitation charges sentenced to federal prison

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – A 46-year-old Jacksonville man who pleaded guilty to conspiring to sex traffic a child and his 50-year-old wife who pleaded guilty to possession of child sex abuse material were sentenced Tuesday to federal prison.

Samuel Templeman was sentenced to 13 years in federal prison, and his wife, Deborah Templeman, was sentenced to six years in prison. In addition, the couple was also sentenced to 10 years of supervised probation following their release from prison, and they will have to register as sex offenders once they are leased.

The couple requested they be sent to a prison closer to Jacksonville, and the judge granted that request.

Right before the couple was handed their sentences, Judge Marcia Howard said, “This case was anything but ordinary.” She also said, “These were not just poor decisions. This was a horrible, unimaginable wrong.”

Court documents state that the teenage girl was taken to arranged dates with men.

According to the plea agreements, the Templemans would spend Deborah Templeman’s bi-weekly salary within one to two days, and for the rest of the month, they lived off the money made from sex trafficking the child and the child’s occasional panhandling. The Templemans spent most of that money on drugs and the rest on living expenses, according to prosecutors.

On December 11, 2019, a detective with the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office went to Deborah Templeman’s place of employment in an attempt to locate the child. According to prosecutors, while there, the detective overheard phone conversations in which Samuel Templeman told Deborah Templeman that he was taking the child to a “date,” a common slang term for an appointment for the child to have sex for money, and that he would then go pick up Deborah Templeman. When Samuel Templeman later arrived at Deborah Templeman’s workplace, authorities arrested him and recovered the child.

Investigators looked through Deborah Templeman’s cellphone after getting a search warrant and found it contained sexually explicit images of the child, prosecutors said. According to the prosecutors, Deborah Templeman admitted that she knew those images were stored on her phone.

The United States Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida announced in July 2021 that Samuel Templeman and Deborah Templeman had pleaded guilty.


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