LEWISTON — A Greene man who pleaded guilty to having child pornography on his home computer will serve no more than six months in jail, after reaching an agreement with prosecutors.
Joshua Chretien, 25, of 485 Route 202 was indicted in October by an Androscoggin County grand jury on 10 counts of possession of sexually explicit material of a minor under 12. Each charge is a Class C felony punishable by up to five years in prison.
In exchange for his guilty plea last week to five of those charges, prosecutors agreed to a sentence of two and a half years with all but six months suspended. Chretien will be allowed at his June sentencing to argue for less than six months behind bars. His jail term would be followed by two years of probation and lifetime registration as a sex offender.
Chretien’s sentencing was delayed for six months while he attends a sex-offender counseling program, Deputy District Attorney James Andrews said.
Meanwhile, Chretien will remain free on $200 cash bail.
In April 2015, Maine State Police Detective Justin Kittredge of the Maine Computer Crimes Unit conducted an online investigation seeking offenders sharing child pornography, Andrews told Unified Criminal Court Justice Rick Lawrence. Using special software, Kittredge found an IP address — a location on the Internet — that he associated with child pornography. He used his computer to connect with a “suspect device” that was visiting that IP address, Andrews said.
Later that month, Kittredge successfully downloaded two files from the subscriber device visiting that Internet address that was making those images available, Andrews said. Those files contained images of naked female children younger than 12 years old.
Kittredge applied for an Androscoggin County grand jury subpoena that would enable him to identify the subscriber information for that Internet address, which he determined to be Lisa Merrill of 485 Route 202 in Greene.
Kittredge applied for a search warrant at that address. On May 20, Kittredge executed the warrant with other members of his computer crimes unit.
Chretien was at that address when the warrant was served. He explained to police that he lived with his mother, but told police he was the sole user of the computer that police linked to the pornography Internet address.
He admitted having downloaded child pornography and told police that they would find child pornography in deleted files on his computer.
Police seized his computer and brought it to the Maine State Police crime laboratory in Augusta. After a preliminary analysis of the collected evidence, Chretien was arrested, Andrews said.
The analyst had found “numerous images” had been downloaded to the computer. The analyst compared the downloaded files to those maintained by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children as children known to be under a certain age. Of the 13 files the analyst submitted to the organization, three were identified as victims known to the group by their age, Andrews told the court.
A condition of Chretien’s bail conditions includes the restriction of only supervised visits with his son.
cwilliams@sunjournal.com
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