NEWPORT NEWS, Va. — A previously convicted child sex offender in Newport News plead guilty Tuesday to transportation of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on several occasions last year.
Court documents indicate that Justus Clay Pease, 51, uploaded several files containing CSAM to his Google account in April 2023. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received Cybertipline reports of the uploads and also discovered more files in Pease's Google Photos account that contained CSAM.
Pease will be sentenced on Jan. 16, 2025. He faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years in prison and could be sentenced up to 40 years.
Prosecutors say Pease was convicted in Hampton Circuit Court in 2005 of two counts of indecent liberties with a child by a custodian, and in 2007 of one count of indecent liberties with children.
The case came to court as part of Project Safe Childhood, which is a nationwide initiative from the Department of Justice that aims to counter child sexual exploitation and uses U.S. Attorney's Offices and the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section to allocate resources toward prosecuting child sexual offenders.
