Grant Gross
Senior Writer

U.S. man sentenced after sharing child porn in chat room

News
Aug 30, 20062 mins

A Wichita, Kansas, man Tuesday was sentenced to 19 years in prison after sharing child pornography videos in a Yahoo chat room, the Department of Justice said.

Steven C. Perrine, 53, was sentenced in U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas. He was convicted in June on one count of distributing child pornography, one count of receiving child pornography, one count of possessing child pornography and one count of unlawfully possessing a firearm after a felony conviction.

Perrine was on probation for a prior conviction for the sexual exploitation of a minor when he was arrested in this case, U.S. Attorney Eric Melgren of the District of Kansas said in a press release.

Law enforcement officers found seven computer hard drives containing “thousands” of images containing child pornography during a search of Perrine’s home, Melgren said.

Perrine played videos containing child pornography to another Yahoo user in a chat room in September 2005, the Justice Department said. The second user, located in Pennsylvania, alerted police there, and investigators tracked the videos to Perrine, the Justice Department said.

On Dec. 22, investigators served a search warrant at Perrine’s home, where they seized firearms as well as two computers containing images of child pornography, the Justice Department said.

Perrine pleaded guilty on Oct. 14, 2003, to the sexual exploitation of a child charge.

Grant Gross

Grant Gross, a senior writer at CIO, is a long-time IT journalist who has focused on AI, enterprise technology, and tech policy. He previously served as Washington, D.C., correspondent and later senior editor at IDG News Service. Earlier in his career, he was managing editor at Linux.com and news editor at tech careers site Techies.com. As a tech policy expert, he has appeared on C-SPAN and the giant NTN24 Spanish-language cable news network. In the distant past, he worked as a reporter and editor at newspapers in Minnesota and the Dakotas. A finalist for Best Range of Work by a Single Author for both the Eddie Awards and the Neal Awards, Grant was recently recognized with an ASBPE Regional Silver award for his article “Agentic AI: Decisive, operational AI arrives in business.”

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