U.S. District Judge Deborah K. Chasanow sentenced Ronald G. Draper, Jr., 37 of Mechanicsville, March 30, to 14 years in prison, followed by lifetime supervised release for distributing child pornography, announced United States Attorney for the District of Maryland Rod J. Rosenstein.

According to his guilty plea, Draper, an employee of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources from December 1998 to April, 2006, possessed more than 600 images depicting the sexual abuse of children, including photographs and video files, that were stored on compact discs and an e-mail account in his home and in his leased storage unit in Charlotte Hall.  A number of the images depicted the sexual abuse of minors who were younger than 12 years old.  Draper admitted that on numerous occasions during the several years before his arrest in September 2007, he emailed to others images of child pornography that he had downloaded from the Internet.

This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice. Led by United States Attorneys’ Offices and the Criminal Division's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS), Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state and local resources to better locate, apprehend and prosecute individuals who exploit children via the Internet, as well as to identify and rescue victims.
 
For more information about Project Safe Childhood, please visit www.projectsafechildhood.gov.   Details about Maryland’s program are available at http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/md/Safe-Childhood/index.html.