Pulaski County Circuit Judge Barry Sims on Thursday sentenced a convicted child molester to 60 years in prison on Thursday for 20 counts of possessing child pornography with a succinct assessment of the defendant's deviant proclivities.
"You disgust me," the judge told 53-year-old David William Engstrom of Little Rock after seeing some of the illegal photographs that authorities had found on the defendant's computer.
"I just hope I can erase them from my mind," Sims said, describing the images as "horrifying."
The prosecutor, Assistant Attorney General Will Jones, called Engstrom a "threat" to children and asked the judge to impose a lengthy prison term because of the children who were victimized in the photographs.
Each of the children shown in the pictures is a separate victim, Jones said, making Engstrom's crimes comparable to him having committed 20 bank robberies.
Those pictures presented in court were a "small sample" of the 899 that Engstrom had collected, Jones said, pointing out that Engstrom was on probation for failure to register as a sex offender when he was arrested.
"Justice intends for this [sentence] to be on the higher end," he told the judge. "We don't know how many other images there are of children being raped, tortured and abused."
Attorney General Dustin McDaniel, whose office oversaw Engstrom's investigation and prosecution, said the prison term should warn other offenders that Arkansas will aggressively pursue them.
"This prison sentence demonstrates that the state has no tolerance for criminals who prey on our children," McDaniel said. "I'm so proud of the work the attorney general's Cyber Crimes Unit put into this. This conviction sends a strong message that we will never stop trying to apprehend and punish those who use the Internet to harm our most vulnerable citizens."
Engstrom testified he had already gotten over his interest in seeing sexually explicit depictions of children by the time he was arrested in July 2013 by investigators of the attorney general's office at the Lancelot Court home of a friend who had taken him in. He said all of the images would have been deleted if authorities had just gotten to him a few days later.
Authorities had been able to access his computer a month before his arrest and find the prohibited pictures.
He admitted searching for images of children between the ages of 9 and 12. But he told the judge he had no interest in having sex with children despite his 1996 Lonoke County conviction for first-degree sexual abuse of a girl.
"I don't have an interest in that. It's far too much effort and risk. It's just not worth it," Engstrom testified.
The prosecutor accused Engstrom of trying to deceive the judge about his interest in children, pointing out that the pictures included victims who were not old enough to speak.
And if Engstrom was not sexually interested in children, he was asked, why would he go to the time-consuming process of acquiring the images through a file-sharing program, which can take hours to download. Engstrom replied that he preferred to be alone, saying he has not had an intimate partner since his divorce in connection with his molestation conviction.
"I'm accustomed to seeing to my own needs, and I'm not interested in a relationship with anyone," Engstrom said.
Engstrom denied knowing another defendant charged with child-porn possession, 69-year-old David Raymond West of Jacksonville, even though a computer with West's name and address on it were found in Engstrom's home about six months before his arrest. West, arrested four months after Engstrom, is scheduled for trial at the end of this month.
Defense attorney Matt McKay asked the judge to follow sentencing guidelines, which recommended a 21/2-year sentence but also allowed for probation. McKay asked the judge to consider Engstrom's guilty plea, nine-year Navy career and poor health as mitigators to a lengthy prison term.
Engstrom pleaded guilty to the charges, 20 counts of possession of matter depicting sexually explicit conduct involving a child, last month in an agreement with prosecutors to leave the sentencing decision up to the judge.
With his criminal background, Engstrom could have been sentenced to a maximum of 400 years in prison. He'll be eligible for parole after serving 10 years.
Metro on 01/09/2015