Father-of-seven Josh Duggar is sentenced to 12.5 years in prison and is banned from using the internet and unsupervised access to his OWN children after downloading ‘worst of worst’ child porn from computer at his Arkansas car dealership

Joshua ‘Josh’ Duggar, 34, was jailed for 12 years and seven months at his sentencing hearing in Fayetteville, Arkansas on Wednesday

*The disgraced reality TV star has been in custody since December, when a jury convicted him of two counts of downloading and possessing child porn 

At sentencing judge Brooks told Duggar that his crimes were exacerbated by the ‘sadistic’ nature of the abuse, the ages of the kids involved and his refusal to accept his guilt

Judge Timothy Brooks sentenced Duggar solely on a charge of receiving pornography after attorneys agreed to vacate a lesser offense

The judge, however, slapped him with a longer sentence because of the molestation he subjected his own sisters to when he was a teenager

Duggar will remain under supervision for a further 20 years after his release and is not allowed unsupervised access to children – including his own

The pervert who once nursed ambitions of running as a conservative Christian politician, was also barred from accessing the internet, banned from viewing adult porn and hit with fines totally $50,100

Defense attorneys had asked for a five-year stretch, the lightest possible punishment Prosecutors demanded a 20-year term 

Last week his mother, Michelle, and his wife, Anna, both wrote letters to the judge describing Josh’s ‘character’ and pleading for a light sentence 

Disgraced reality TV star Josh Duggar was jailed for more than 12-and-a-half years Wednesday for downloading a vile trove of ‘the sickest of the sickest’ child porn.
US District Judge Timothy Brooks panned the convict for his refusal to accept his guilt, while handing down the 151-month prison sentence at the Western District of Arkansas Federal Courthouse in Fayetteville at the end of a day-long hearing on Wednesday. 
Duggar, 34, has been in custody since December when a federal jury found the married father-of-seven guilty of possession and receipt of child pornography.
‘The images were some of the worst that this court has ever encountered,’ Judge Brooks told Duggar, as his wife Anna, 33, sat a few yards behind him in the public gallery during Wednesday’s hearing. 
The court heard in December how josh who starred as the oldest sibling in the family oriented TV show ’19 Kids and Counting’, used the desktop computer at his used auto dealership to troll the dark web for hundreds of warped films and photos.
One notorious movie, ‘Daisy’s Destruction’, featured the abuse and torture of an infant. Another sequence of images depicted a girl being whipped with a cat o’ nine tails, tied up and locked in a dog cage.

‘I can’t get the dog kennel image out of my head. The description of Daisy’s Destruction is horrific, it’s sick,’ the Judge Brooks said during sentencing.
He told Duggar that his crimes were exacerbated by the ‘sadistic’ nature of the abuse, the ages of the kids involved and his refusal to accept his guilt.
The little girl featured in Daisy’s Destruction appeared to be no older than an infant, Judge Brooks added, describing that particular title as the ‘sickest of the sickest’.

Duggar, who once nursed ambitions of running as a conservative Christian politician, appeared for sentencing in a grey suit, sporting a scruffy beard and grown-out buzz cut, where he was hit with a longer sentence because of record of molesting his own sisters when he was a teenager.
‘As the court has found, you have a history of sexual abuse. One of the Jane Does was five-year-old, you were 15,’ Judge Brooks added.
‘You [remain] locked into the very same age group as the Jane Does. We can say it’s been a long time, and it has. But the sexual interest is the same.’
Duggar was sentenced solely on a charge of receiving pornography after prosecution and defense attorneys agreed to vacate a lesser offense of possession.
He will remain under supervision for a further 20 years after his release and is not allowed unsupervised access to children – including his own, who range in age from six months to 12.
The pervert was also barred from accessing the internet, banned from viewing adult porn and hit with fines totally $50,100.

 

Duggar showed little emotion as he was led away by US marshals, looking back at Anna and making a heart shape with his hands, which she reciprocated.
Neither Anna, wearing a pretty blue dress and black mask, nor his dad Jim Bob, spoke as they left court.
The decision came one day after Brooks denied a defense motion to overturn the guilty verdict on grounds of insufficient evidence or to order a new trial. 
Defense attorneys had asked for a five-year stretch, the lightest possible punishment, insisting that Duggar, said to be a devoted dad and committed Christian, maintained his innocence and intended to appeal.

They argued that, of the approximately 600 child porn images identified by investigators, only a small portion had been viewed and none of those fell into the category of ‘sadistic or masochistic’.
Prosecutors demanded a 20-year term – the maximum possible – arguing that it was hard to think of anything more sadistic that a grown man raping a little girl.
They said Duggar had never sought treatment or shown any acceptance of his warped appetites and thus had a high chance of re-offending.
The disgraced reality TV star, 34, who first gained national notoriety after t was revealed that he molested several of his younger sisters as a teenager.

In December Joshua ‘Josh’ Duggar was found guilty on two counts of downloading and possessing child pornography. He was charged after investigators traced and found a trove of the disturbing material on his work computer at his now-defunct used auto dealership in April last year.
Operatives found the tawdry and incriminating images on Duggar’s office HP computer. He secretly scoured the dark web for illegal footage of child sex abuse, feds said.
Describing the scene, the agents said that on the surface, the desktop looked like a typical work environment computer, featuring a wholesome family portrait of father-of-seven Duggar, his wife Anna and their children as the screen wallpaper.
However, digging beyond the apparent investigators traced extremely disturbing child porn image downloads to the IP address of Duggar’s dealership, Wholesale Motorcars, in Springdale, Arkansas.
Feds also confiscated the office HP desktop computer along with his iPhone.

At trial, to illustrate the lasting devastation done to child pornography victims, prosecutors reproduced testimony from the mother of a young girl who had appeared in one of the videos Duggar downloaded. ‘My daughter is a real person,’ the mother stated.
‘She was horribly victimized to provide this source of ‘entertainment’. She is exploited anew each and every time an image of her suffering is copied, traded or sold.
‘I asked my daughter what she most wanted to ask of the judge. Her request: ‘Please, don’t let them pretend no-one’s getting hurt!’
‘She had some words for the defendant as well: ‘don’t you know no one should do that to a little girl! Don’t you know it hurts!’

Recalling the mother’s words in court, Judge Brooks described the testimony as ‘chilling’.
‘For the victims it never goes away. It’s on the internet, probably for forever,’ he told the court, which was packed with Duggar’s friends and family.
Duggar’s mom Michelle and Anna had both written letters pleading for leniency, the latter comparing her husband to Ronald Reagan in an effort to stress his work ethic and decency.
‘Joshua has a compassionate heart and he is willing to make personal sacrifices for the benefit of others,’ Anna wrote.
‘Joshua embodies the quote from Ronald Reagan: ‘There is no limit to the amount of good you can do if you don’t care who gets the credit’.

Responding, prosecutors said that Duggar’s supportive family and ‘privileged lifestyle’ merely made his crimes ‘all the more baffling’.
They argued that a ‘pattern of activity enhancement’ should be applied to his sentence, citing evidence from Bobye Holt, a family friend who testified about the molestation scandal that engulfed the Duggars in 2015 and led to their TLC show being canceled.

Holt choked back tears as she revealed how Duggar had confessed at age 15 to groping and penetrating his younger sisters during ‘bible time’ and while they slept.
The defense fought to exclude her testimony but the judge ultimately agreed that it provided important clues about his sinister appetite for minors.
‘Despite achieving some level of fame through reality television as an adult, he is better known at this point for his behavior outside his family’s show, including his sexual improprieties and criminal sexual conduct,’ prosecutors wrote of Duggar.
‘More importantly, none of these letters meaningfully grapple with his crimes or his sexual proclivities toward prepubescent girls.’
Judge Brooks agreed largely with the prosecution at Wednesday’s sentencing but threw out a claim that Duggar had ‘distributed’ child porn as well as receiving it.
He also had kinds words for the Duggar family, noting how Anna in particular was devoted to her husband and had stuck by him throughout the trial.
‘They are going to love you no matter what,’ he told Duggar. ‘That family support is mitigating. They are going to help you get through this.’

The astonishing downfall of the one time aspiring conservative politician, began on May 14, 2019 when his computer made the first of two ‘digital handshakes’ with Detective Amber Kalmer of the Little Rock Police Department.
Kalmer was using a specialist police program called Torrential Downpour which targets pedophiles by catching them in the act of sharing child pornography files online.

She tipped off Feds who traced the IP address to Wholesale Motorcars and seized Duggar’s office HP desktop, iPhone and MacBook..
After volunteering to speak with agents – but without knowing anything about the nature of the probe – Duggar asked them: ‘Has someone been downloading child pornography?’
When forensic scientists studied the HP they found someone had installed complicated software called a Linux partition which creates a second, independent operating system within the same device.

The partition could only be accessed by rebooting, hitting F9 and entering the password intel1988 – the same password used for Duggar’s internet banking and the Duggar family Instagram and Twitter accounts.
It provided the secret online space where he could search for, download, then delete child pornography, all behind the innocent veneer of a standard work computer with a wholesome wallpaper of his family.
The Linux partition also helped Duggar circumnavigate Covenant Eyes, an ‘accountability’ program installed on his computers and phones to warn his wife if he looked at porn or tried to download peer-to-peer software.
The government retrieved dozens of backed up text messages and images from Duggar’s Apple devices that placed him at the car lot at almost the precise same times that the porn was downloaded and viewed.
One image appeared to show someone pointing their phone at the HP computer to take a screenshot of a YouTube video about car repairs.
Metadata revealed it was taken at 4:20pm on May 14, 2019 – less than an hour before Duggar’s computer received a vile trove of child pornography entitled ‘webcam collection’.

A closer look at the faint reflection on the screen revealed it to be Duggar wearing a distinctive Wholesale Motorcars baseball cap. He was wearing the same hat later that day in a selfie he took with his wife.
Prior to today’s sentencing Judge Brooks threw out several defense motions arguing the trial was unfair as Duggar remained locked up at the Washington County Detention Center awaiting his fate.
Duggar’s lawyers contended that a former employee or hacker could have exploited Duggar’s lax internet security to hijack his computer and remotely download and view the child porn without anyone knowing. Prosecutors branded their arguments a ‘fantasy’ and jurors unanimously agreed after deliberating for six hours.
Investigators had ample evidence that Josh Duggar’s HP desktop was used to download child porn – but could they prove he was the pervert who sat watching it?
The answer was yes, thanks to a fortuitous cell phone photo that captured Duggar’s reflection as he stared at the computer’s screen.
Forensic investigators came across the critical image as they scoured backed up data from the disgraced TV star’s old iPhone 8.
Metadata revealed it was taken at 4:20pm on May 14, 2019 – less than an hour before Duggar’s computer received a trove of child pornography entitled ‘webcam collection’.

At first glance the photo appeared to show nothing more than the phone being pointed towards the HP desktop as it played a YouTube tutorial about camshaft repairs.
However investigators soon spotted a faint reflection in the monitor of what appeared to be a person wearing a Wholesale Motorcars baseball cap. A comparison with a selfie taken at 8:35pm that same evening as Duggar shopped at a hardware store with his wife Anna showed that he was wearing the exact same hat.
Investigators found another important photo that the selfie-obsessed pervert had taken on the forecourt of his car dealership. The metadata said it was taken at 4:47pm on June 22, a time corroborated by a large LED clock in the window of Duggar’s scruffy office that was a few minutes fast.

When forensic experts searched behind the Linux partition installed on Duggar’s desktop they found it had been used for legitimate work purposes on one only occasion: to draw up a sales receipt for a 2004 Toyota 4Runner.
The paperwork was dated June 22 and the sales agent was listed as ‘Josh’.
Prosecutors at Duggar’s Federal child porn trial said the fact that the invoice was found behind the Linux partition proved whoever wrote it up had access to the computer’s secret ‘child porn’ side.
The selfie further confirmed that Duggar was there that day and was likely the person who sold the car and wrote up the receipt, they told jurors. 

At Wednesday sentencing the judge Brook referring to the convict’s insistence that he’s innocent, said: “I find it aggravating about the lack of responsibility.”
Josh Duggar was previously found guilty of possessing and receiving child pornography on December 9 after a nearly two-week trial. After Josh is released, he will serve 20 more years of probation and will be forbidden from unsupervised visits with children.
He will not be allowed to have a computer or view pornography of any kind.
His wife Anna, sister Joy-Anna, dad Jim Bob and brothers Jason and James who were in court at his sentencing, appeared to having a hard time with the considerable sentence. After learning of their relative’s fate, his siblings appeared saddened by the judge’s decision, while Anna and Jim Bob remained emotionless.