Child porn draws 25-year term; Conway man photographed 4-year-old, put images online

A Conway man's decision to take sexually explicit photographs of a 4-year-old girl while she was temporarily left in his care in a parking lot in Star City resulted in a 25-year federal prison sentence Tuesday.

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Nicholas Decarlos Tensley, 29, pleaded guilty Oct. 9 to production of child pornography in return for a related distribution charge being dropped. Facing 15 to 30 years in prison on the production charge alone, Tensley took the plea deal, agreeing that he was subject to a sentencing enhancement because the victim was younger than 12.

Chief U.S. District Judge Brian Miller imposed the sentence, as well as a 10-year term of supervised release, after reviewing a confidential pre-sentence report prepared for the court.

The charges against Tensley stemmed from an investigation that began in March 2015 when an undercover police officer with the FBI and the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department's Child Exploitation Task Force posted an advertisement on a website frequented by people with a sexual interest in children and incest, according to U.S. Attorney Chris Thyer and Diane Upchurch, special agent in charge of the FBI's Little Rock field office.

Tensley responded to the ad on April 14, 2015, claiming to have two daughters, ages 6 and 10, and attaching two sexually explicit images of girls who he indicated were his daughters, Thyer and Upchurch said, noting that Tensley didn't have any young daughters. They said Tensley also bragged online about having had sex with one of the "daughters" and, the next day, sent seven more photographs of a prepubescent girl who he said was his daughter.

The Little Rock division of the FBI tracked the post to a mobile phone registered to Tensley, whom law enforcement databases found had lived in Spokane, Wash., but had moved to Conway, according to a court document. After verifying he lived at a particular Conway address, agents arrested him there April 16, 2015.

Upchurch said Tensley confessed to sending the pictures electronically and provided consent for agents to search his mobile phone. She said he later admitted to using his phone to take the photographs in the Fred's Store parking lot in Star City, where he had been "left to babysit" the girl, who was a friend's daughter. He also admitted to touching the girl sexually, as evidenced by one of the photographs, according to court documents.

"All too often some people argue that the downloading of child pornography from the Internet is a 'victimless crime,'" Thyer said in a news release he issued Tuesday after Tensley was sentenced, adding, "Nothing could be further from the truth."

Thyer said Tensley's case "clearly demonstrates that as long as there is a market for individuals who would download child pornography, there will be individuals like Tensley who will sexually abuse other children so that they can then trade or sell those images of abuse with like-minded people."

Thyer also said, "The sexual exploitation of a four-year-old child in the care of a trusted individual is despicable and sickening in and of itself. However, this child -- along with thousands of others like her -- will be victimized over and over again as sexual deviants download and view the images of her abuse from the Internet."

Metro on 05/18/2016

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