Man sentenced for child porn

A Marysville man was sentenced Thursday in U.S. District Court in Sacramento to 171⁄2 years in prison for possessing and distributing Internet pictures of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct.

Jeffery Cloward, 29, was indicted on the charges in early 2007 after sending pictures to an Alabama sheriff's lieutenant posing as a 14-year-old girl.

Cloward will be on supervised release for the rest of his life after serving the sentence, said U.S. Attorney McGregor W. Scott.

Cloward admitted regularly receiving and distributing child pornography and having sexual fantasies about children since his teens, according to Scott's office.

In a letter to Judge Morrison C. England Jr., Cloward said he was attracted to young girls only "in the friendly sense" but got caught up in pedophile chat rooms.

"I suppose it was like how people are sometimes curious about murderers, wanting to get in their heads to see how and why they think like they do," Cloward wrote.

"Just because you get into the head of a murderer and are able to even understand why they kill, that certainly doesn't mean that person will become a murderer as well," he wrote.

Some of the pictures he received were "graphic and shocking" and he deleted them, Cloward said, "but I would end up going back to those channels eventually and start talking again and people would send me more pictures."

Eventually, when woman and girls no longer wanted to chat, he began portraying himself as a woman.

"That is how lonely I was in real life that I had to resort to a weird fantasy life instead," he wrote.

"Even when I used my real name I still wasn't totally myself since in reality I have no sexual attraction towards kids at all," he wrote.

Cloward told the judge he is a virgin and has never had a girlfriend, except for holding hands with a girl at age 13.

"It is bad enough to be a virgin at my age, but to have never had a real girlfriend or have kissed a girl yet is even worse," he wrote.

Cloward called the length of his sentence fitting for a child molester or killer. Three to eight years "seems a lot more reasonable," he said.

He wrote that he wants to move on with his life, get married, become a productive member of society and help people or animals.