40 years in prison for Texas man running website of stories about raping, murdering children
(The AEGIS Alliance) – 64-year-old Texas man Thomas Alan Arthur that had been pronounced guilty by a federal jury in court for 9 counts of obscene criminal offenses involving kids was sentenced to 40 years behind bars on Tuesday.
Arthur was found guilty in January of 2021 for trafficking written stories and illustrations of sexual abuse against children and even babies and also murder on an internet site he had operated on since 1996. Arthur directly assessed as well as permitted all entries prior to their publication.
The evidence shown at trial revealed that the site named Mr. Double was Arthur’s “sole source of income for over 20 years,” the Department of Justice stated in a news release. Arthur made revenue through billing participants’ fees to access the internet site’s violent content. He started billing site visitors in 1998.
The website has been shut down in November 2019 when the FBI carried out a search warrant as well as raided Arthur’s house that was close to Big Bend National Park in the city of Terlingua Texas, close to the state’s south-central border. This has been Arthur’s base of operations for running the website, however, web servers in the Netherlands were hosting the site. Law enforcement obtained additional evidence coming from the overseas hosting servers “pursuant to a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty with the Netherlands.”
Arthur is additionally purportedly guilty of sexual criminal offenses unassociated with his internet site. While Arthur was being looked into for Mr. Double, a couple of women stepped forward concerning their past experiences of assault by him. In the early 1980s, Arthur purportedly molested the young little girl of his friend and also company associate; the victim was only 3 or 4 years old at the time. In 1992, he purportedly recorded video of himself sexually attacking an adult female that had been living with him, the DOJ pointed out. These attacks aren’t included in his charging or prison sentence.
Included in the 40-year prison sentence, Arthur was additionally handed down a $50,000 fine and also ordered to serve a three-year duration of post-incarceration supervised release. However, due to Arthur’s advanced age, during the time of sentencing, it’s extremely unlikely he will fulfill his entire sentence during the course of his lifetime.
Criminals that are found guilty of child porn or pedophilia-related criminal offenses have traditionally experienced violent threats coming from fellow prisoners in the United States prison system.
“Their life is truly a living hell,” Leslie Walker, a prisoner’s rights activist for the Massachusetts Correctional Legal Society stated.
Jeffrey Childers – The AEGIS Alliance – This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
