Marc L. Leonardis, a 50-year-old man from Skaneateles, was sentenced to 188 months in prison for receiving and disseminating child pornography through online trading groups, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of New York.
As part of his guilty plea, Leonardis confessed to secretly capturing images of a child and sharing these over 200 times within these groups, in exchange for images showing child sexual exploitation.
Aside from the prison sentence, Judge David N. Hurd also mandated a 15-year supervised release following Leonardis’s prison term, ordered him to pay $5,000 each in restitution to two victims featured in the received pornography, and to pay an additional $5,100 in special assessments.
Furthermore, Leonardis will be required to register as a sex offender. The case was handled by the FBI’s Capital Area and Mid-State Child Exploitation Task Forces, with collaboration from various local police departments and overseen by the Project Safe Childhood initiative, aiming to improve efforts in locating and prosecuting online child exploiters.
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