Man sentenced to 17 years in child pornography case

PORTLAND – A Portland man who served 12 years in prison for sexually abusing a child in California was sentenced Monday to serve 17 more years after using Facebook Messenger to convince a teenager to take sexually explicit videos of himself.

Prosecutors said Scott Lawrence, 57, posed online as a woman and communicated with the teenager from South Dakota, The Oregonian/OregonLive reported.

Lawrence obtained the boy’s videos and distributed a graphic image of the boy to two other people, Assistant U.S. Attorney Gary Sussman said. Lawrence pleaded guilty to receiving and distributing child pornography and violating his supervised release conditions from a 2018 conviction for failure to register as a sex offender.

U.S. District Judge Robert E. Jones ordered Lawrence to face a life term of supervised release following his 17-year federal prison term.

Sussman argued the lengthy sentence was necessary to protect the public.

Both the prosecutor and Lawrence’s lawyer, Francesca Freccero, jointly recommended the prison sentence imposed by the judge. Freccero unsuccessfully argued for five years of supervised release after Lawrence’s prison term.

On Oct. 24, 2019, investigators raided Lawrence’s Portland home with a federal search warrant, seized his cellphone and iPad, and found the videos, according to court records.