A Gordon County man was sentenced to a five-year prison sentence for possession of child pornography in U.S. District Court in Rome on Friday.

Ricky Lee McDaniel was originally arrested in August 2003, but the indictment was later dropped in lieu of evidence being examined.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Will Traynor said the hard drive of a computer, thought to contain evidence, was damaged and took a lengthy amount of time to recover. McDaniel was reindicted in 2008.

McDaniel was convicted in July 2009 of having possession of 1,200 images and four videos of child pornography on floppy disks locked in the nightstand next to his bed.

“It’s an impressive display of persistence in intentional misconduct,” assistant U.S. Attorney Will Traynor said referring to the time it would have taken to download the images and videos via the Internet.

One of the pieces of downloaded child pornography was from a case where a victim’s father sexually assaulted her and posted it on the Internet.

The now teenage victim said in a letter read to the court she still lives with the knowledge that someone somewhere is watching the most horrifying moments of her life and taking a grotesque pleasure in them.

“They’re trading my trauma around like treats at a party,” the letter stated. “I will never have control over who sees me being raped as a child.”

Judge Harold L. Murphy reiterated that McDaniel did not perpetrate this assault but was convicted of downloading the content from the Internet.

The prosecution requested a sentence of over seven years, alleging that McDaniel had willfully obstructed justice by testifying at his trial that a now deceased man was the one who downloaded images of child pornography to his computer.

The judge voiced concern of sentencing a man to an extended prison sentence since he had never been in trouble with the law before or since his initial arrest six years ago.

Calhoun Times