Child porn charges land man in jail again

WEST CHESTER >> A West Chester man who had spent time in jail for possessing child pornography a decade ago was sentenced Thursday to state prison on the same type of charges.

Steven Michael Clark was charged last year with multiple counts of sexual abuse of children, the technical term for a case of child porn possession, after Chester County Detectives found numerous images depicting young children in sexual acts with adult men and women on a laptop computer he owned.

He was sentenced to 10 to 20 years in state prison by Common Pleas Judge David Bortner as part of a plea agreement between the prosecution and his attorney.

“I want to apologize for everything I’ve done,” Clark, 30, told

Bortner when given the opportunity to address the court. “I will take this time to try to understand why I did what I did.”

According to Deputy District Attorney Erin O’Brien of the D.A.’s Child Abuse Unit, who handled the prosecution,

Clark could have faced a mandatory prison term of 25 to 50 years for the four counts of sexual abuse of children to which he pleaded guilty. But because he had accepted responsibility and tendered the plea, she said, he was offered the lesser prison sentence.

Clark was led from Bortner’s courtroom in handcuffs to begin serving his sentence.

In her description of the case, O’Brien said that in July 2019 the Chester County Detectives received a cybertip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that someone had been uploading more than 50 images involving the sexual abuse of children to a Yahoo email account.

Investigators were able to trace the Internet address to a home in the 700 block of

South Adams Street where Clark lived. In a search of the home, detectives found a laptop computer and an SD card, an examination of which turned up more than 100 illicit images.

O’Brien said the four images that Clark admitted to possessing as part of the plea agreement showed children, pre-teens and as young as 3, engaging in sexual acts with adults.

Included in the sentence that O’Brien and Clark’s attorney, Tim Trott of West Chester, negotiated, are the requirements that he had no unsupervised contact with minors; that he undergo a sex offender evaluation and follow treatment; that he register as a sex offender with the state under Megan’s Law rules; and that he surrender his computer.

Clark had been arrested by county detectives in March 2010 and charged with similar counts of sexual abuse of children for pornography found at his home then. He was sentenced to six to 23 months in Chester County Prison and ordered to be on probation for four additional years in that case.