A Broadalbin man was sentenced to just more than eight years in prison Tuesday for possessing dozens of child pornography videos and images on his computer.
Paul Nelligan Jr., 39, was sentenced in Federal District Court in Albany on his guilty plea to one count of receiving child pornography, according to the U.S. Justice Department. He will serve a 97-month prison term, after which he will be placed on supervised release for the rest of his life.
The nearly three-year investigation began when FBI agents downloaded child pornography still images from Nelligan over the Internet in October 2008. On June 15, 2009, they executed a search warrant at his Broadalbin residence, where they seized the Compaq Presario computer that Nelligan used to obtain child pornography, along with other electronic items.
“The FBI is obviously very active in pursuing not only those individuals who produce these images, but also those individuals who possess, receive and distribute them,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Rick Belliss said.
On Jan. 27 of this year Nelligan pleaded guilty to receiving child pornography over the Internet. The charge carried a maximum penalty of 20 years of imprisonment, with a mandatory minimum sentence of five years.
Between about October 2005 and June 2009, Nelligan knowingly received and collected child pornography through the file-sharing program Limewire and various websites, investigators said. He saved still images and movie files depicting minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct on his computer.
Around October 2008, investigators were able to identify Nelligan’s IP address from his Internet account with Time Warner Cable. They then found that his computer was permitting other Limewire users to obtain the child pornography he had saved.
A forensic examination of his computer yielded movie files and still images, all of which depicted minors in sexually explicit conduct as defined by federal law.
Albany District Judge Gary Sharpe ordered Nelligan to have no unsupervised contact with minors and to register with the New York State Sex Offender Registry Program upon release from prison.
The case was investigated by the FBI’s Capital Region Cyber Predator Task Force, which works with the New York State Police Internet Crimes Against Children task force. Upstate New York agencies assist in the task force, including police departments in Albany, Bethlehem, Colonie, Guilderland and Waterford, the state Division of Parole and the Rensselaer County Sheriff’s Office.
Categories: Schenectady County
