A 48-year-old Chatsworth man with two prior sex-crime convictions, including one in Gwinnett County, was sentenced Thursday to 22 years in a federal prison on a child pornography charge, authorities said.
Albert Vernon Norton, who previously had pleaded guilty to receiving child pornography, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Robert L. Vining, according to the U.S. Attorney's office.
U.S. Attorney Sally Quillian Yates said, “In this case, the GBI and the Secret Service teamed up in an aggressive initiative to actively find those who use the Internet to share child pornography.”
Norton's prison term will be followed by a lifetime of supervised release. There is no parole in the federal system.
The case dates to the late fall of 2009, when a GBI investigation code-named “Operation Restore Hope” identified individuals throughout the state using peer-to-peer file sharing programs to exchange images and videos of child pornography, authorities said.
The effort led investigators to Norton. The GBI, assisted by local law enforcement and the Secret Service, executed a search warrant at Norton's home and found disks containing hundreds of videos of child pornography, particularly images of minor boys engaged in sexually explicit conduct, authorities said.
Investigators also learned that Norton had two prior convictions, in Gwinnett County and Cumberland County, N.C., for sexual offenses against minor boys.
This case was investigated by special agents of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and Secret Service and prosecuted under the Justice Department's Project Safe Childhood. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jill E. Steinberg prosecuted the case.
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