An Independence man was sentenced to twenty years in prison on Monday following his April guilty plea to 69 counts of possession of child pornography and one count of tampering with physical evidence.
Emmanuel Curry, 21, received the maximum sentence of two decades behind bars. Kentucky caps sentences for convictions on Class C & D felonies at twenty years. He must serve the greater of 20% of his sentence or until he completes Kentucky’s Sexual Offender Treatment Program, before being eligible for parole, Kenton County Commonwealth’s Attorney Rob Sanders said in a news release.
Prosecutors called the case “horrific.” Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Emily Arnzen called the case “horrific” and said that some of the images found in Curry’s possession included sexual abuse of infants so young that they still had hospital bracelets on.
Others included female genital mutilation.
“I prosecute monsters every day, and have seen some horrific evidence over the years, but I’ve never seen anything this sick and twisted,” Arnzen said.
Kenton Co. Circuit Judge Kate Molloy agreed with a prosecutor’s recommendation of the maximum sentence.
Arnzen said that she refused to make any plea offer to Curry, instead offering him the opportunity to take his chances with a judge or a jury. Curry entered an open plea to all charges.
“It’s unfortunate Kentucky law caps the possible sentence for possessing child porn at 20 years because he deserves far more,” Arnzen said.Â
Curry was arrested on February 17, 2021 after Kenton County Police executed a search warrant at his home on McCullum Pike. When police arrived, Curry threw his cell phone out the window , hoping police would not find it.
The phone was later located with 69 files containing the illegal images.
The police investigation began after Detective Brian Jones received a tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) alerting him to someone at an IP address in Kenton County who was using known images of child pornography to search for additional images of child pornography. The process is commonly referred to as a “reverse image search.” The Bing search engine recognized the searched image from its hash value as an image known to depict the sexual abuse of a child between 2 and 4 years old.
When Jones and the other Kenton County Police detectives went to the residence where the IP address was registered, they found it was occupied by Curry and Curry’s father. Detectives seized all the electronics from the residence but did not make an arrest because they had not determined which man was responsible. Shortly after detectives returned to the police station, Curry’s father brought Emmanuel Curry in.
The father told police that his son had confessed to downloading the child pornography after police left the scene.
