Man sent to prison for possessing hundreds of images of child pornography
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IDAHO FALLS – A 27-year-old man was sent to prison on Monday after admitting to possessing hundreds of images and files containing child pornography of children as young as infants.
District Judge Dane Watkins Jr. sentenced Jacob Clinger to one to eight years in prison.
Clinger was initially charged with four counts of felony possession or accessing child sexually exploitative material willfully, to which he had pleaded not guilty.
In May, Clinger accepted a plea agreement in which he agreed to plead guilty to one count of felony possession or accessing child sexually exploitative material willfully, and the prosecution agreed to dismiss the other three counts.
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During sentencing, Bonneville County prosecutor Randy Neal argued for Clinger to be imprisoned for a minimum of one and a half and a maximum of 10 years.
Neal also recommended Clinger be incarcerated in a protected environment out of precaution for Clinger’s safety around other inmates due to the nature of the charges.
“This is a situation where we just can’t overstate the severity,” said Neal. “The fact is that we’re standing here, talking about hundreds of images.”
Clinger’s defense attorney, Curtis Smith, recommended a term of probation or a retained jurisdiction, arguing that his client has no criminal history and a strong support system.
“This happened when he was 26 years old. His brain is just coming into being fully developed,” said Smith. “I’m not suggesting that Jacob didn’t know any better. In fact, if you were to sit with him and his parents as I have for many, many months on end, I think that you would see a side of him where he just feels horrible that this happened, that he did this.”
Before Watkins could pronounce sentencing, a woman in the gallery holding a young child stood up and asked the judge if she could address the court with a victim impact statement.
Neal took a brief break to speak to the woman and find out who she was. Watkins ruled that she would not be allowed to speak, as she was not directly involved with this specific case and did not inform either counsel of her hopes to speak beforehand.
The woman, who wished to remain anonymous, later disclosed to EastIdahoNews.com that she was hoping that Clinger would get a longer prison sentence if she brought her young child to the sentencing, which would force the court to see and hear the child, who was the same age as many of the victims in this case.
Afterward, Clinger addressed the court, apologizing to the child victims.
“I want to apologize to my family and my friends who I’ve let down. To the officers that had to go through the material that I had in order to go through this process,” said Clinger. “If they were here, I wish I could apologize to the victims. I don’t know that they’ll ever know anything about me, or that I’ll ever be able to say anything to them, but I do recognize that they as victims, because of what I’ve done and what others have done to them, they were victimized and hurt. And they will have to live with that their whole life.”
Watkins made closing remarks before declaring the sentence, saying that while he acknowledges that Clinger has no prior criminal history and submitted a guilty plea, it is still a severe crime that deserves prison time.
“I’m not sure that there could possibly be more deviant and disturbing material than in this case. And it’s measured in hundreds of images or files,” said Watkins. “There was discussion, and the court agrees that the mere possession of this and obtaining of it presents a marketplace. What you provide is the demand for that, and others provide the supply.”
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Background of the case
In June 2022, the Idaho Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Unit executed a search warrant at Clinger’s Idaho Falls home, leading to his arrest.
The ICAC found multiple videos on Clinger’s Discord account of children ranging from infancy to 3 years old being sexually abused.
According to court documents, detectives from the Bonneville County Sheriff’s office also obtained messages from a Google account between Clinger and another user “talking about sharing explicit videos of children younger than 10 years old.”
Detectives later interviewed Clinger, where he admitted to joining “pornographic chat rooms” and that the youngest children he had seen on the internet were babies. Investigators found images and video on Clinger’s phone of newborn babies and infants being sexually abused.