WASHINGTON – Sheila L. Sellinger, 34, formerly of Shoals, Indiana, was sentenced to 140 months in prison, Assistant Attorney General Alice S. Fisher for the Criminal Division and U.S. Attorney Susan W. Brooks for the Southern District of Indiana announced today.
Sellinger’s sentencing by U.S. District Judge Richard L. Young was based on her previous plea of guilty to one count of distribution of sexually explicit material involving minors, which took place on June 22, 2006. This case was the result of an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Indiana State Police, and the Martin County Prosecuting Attorney.
Sellinger’s plea and subsequent sentence stemmed from the government’s allegations that the images transported by Sellinger, which depicted a 10 year-old victim partially clothed in suggestive clothing and placed in several unnatural positions emphasizing her genitalia, portrayed a lascivious exhibition of the minor victim’s genitals or pubic area, and thereby constituted images of child pornography. Sellinger admitted that she transported image files containing child pornography in interstate commerce by means of a computer when she sent the images via electronic mail to an individual who placed them on a child modeling website hosted in another state.
The court also imposed a lifetime of supervised release following Sellinger’s release from imprisonment. During this supervised release, Sellinger must register as a sex offender, must seek treatment in a sex offender program and must not have unsupervised contact with minors. Sellinger’s use of any computer will also be subject to monitoring while she is on supervised release. Sellinger was also ordered to pay the costs of the victim’s counseling as needed, and was fined $34,000—twice the amount of money she received for the sale of the sexually explicit images.
The case was prosecuted by Jill Trumbull-Harris, a trial attorney with the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section of the Criminal Division and Todd S. Shellenbarger, an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Indiana.
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