It wasn't just Saturday-morning cartoons Dwight Whorley was watching, nor was it your normal brand of Japanese anime cartoons either.
Whorley, 52, of Richmond, Virginia was sentenced last Friday to 240 months imprisonment on child pornography charges. He was convicted last November of using a public computer at a Virginia Employment Commission ("VEC") office on March 30, 2004, to receive 20 obscene Japanese anime cartoons that graphically depicted prepubescent female children being forced to engage in sexual intercourse with adult males.
Whorley was convicted under a new federal statute enacted in 2003 that criminalizes the production, distribution, or receipt of, or the possession with intent to distribute obscene drawings, cartoons, sculptures, paintings or any other obscene visual representation of the sexual abuse of children. Whorley's conviction for receiving cartoons is the first conviction under the statute that was not based on actual photographs of children.
The jury also convicted Whorley of receiving 14 digital photographs of real children engaging in sexually explicit conduct and of sending and receiving 20 obscene E-mails which graphically described, among other things, parents sexually molesting their own children.
At the time of his arrest in this case, Whorley was a registered sex offender who was convicted in March 1999, on a federal charge of receiving child pornography and was sentenced to 46 months' incarceration.
In January 2003, after serving that sentence and while on supervised release for his earlier conviction, Whorley was re-arrested for violating the conditions of his probation.
Whorley subsequently pled guilty to violating the conditions of his release and was sentenced to an additional 12 months of incarceration to be followed by 12 months of supervision by the United States Probation Office. He was arrested on the present charges on April 5, 2005-just three months after being released from incarceration-when United States Probation Officers learned that Whorley had received child pornography by using a computer at the VEC.
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