Officials from the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office arrested 61-year-old Barry Winn of Fort Pierce on February 11 on 15 counts related to the possession and distribution of child pornography after they conducted a search of his home computer.
Winn’s home on Arizona Avenue was searched by the officials, who discovered both photos and videos during a check of the computer. It showed underage children engaging in a variety of sex acts with both other children and adults.
Discovery of the images resulted in Winn being arrested on 10 counts of possessing child pornography and five counts of distributing it. In addition, he is facing additional charges that have yet to be specified.
During the course of the search, officials indicated that Winn admitted the possession of child pornography. He also allegedly admitted that he had been downloading such images for years and had used specific software to download multiple photos and videos.
Winn also reportedly told officials that he was aware of the illegality of his actions since he had previously reported clients of his computer business for possession of such images. In some instances, Winn had yet to view some of the images that had been downloaded.
Using a Fort Pierce sex crimes lawyer such as Jonathan Jay Kirschner for a case of this nature is important. That’s because images that are merely viewed by someone merely surfing the internet can be copied and stored on multiple locations within a computer operating system. This is especially true for those who have Microsoft Operating Systems.
That can result in the computer user being sent unsolicited material that contains illegal images that are stored, even if the user has no effort to obtain it. Even if such material has been deleted by the computer user, law enforcement has forensic software available that can bring up images that the user has specifically erased. This allows law enforcement to reconstruct digital photographs.
Florida law is broad in determining how possession of such material is defined. That means that Fort Pierce sex crimes lawyer such as Jonathan Jay Kirschner can argue from both a legal and technological perspective on the validity of a case.
So if you or someone you know has been charged with a crime of this nature, contact Fort Pierce sex crimes lawyer Jonathan Jay Kirschner, who has a legal background that spans more than three decades.