Roswell Resident Sentenced in Child Porn Case

Roswell resident Dale Hodges used to tutor children, but now he is headed to prison for keeping child pornography on his computer.

Hodges, 29, was sentenced today by United States District Court Judge Charles A. Pannell, Jr. for images and videos on his computer showing the sexual abuse of young children as part of a ring known as “Boylovers.net” (BLN).

“This prison sentence demonstrates that there are serious consequences for receiving images of innocent children being sexually exploited and traumatized,” said Brock Nicholson, Special Agent in Charge of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)'s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) in Atlanta, which helped investigate the case.

Hodges was prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorneys Jill Steinberg and Robert McBurney as a priority of the Justice Department's Project Safe Childhood after pleading guilty to the charges on February 4, 2011. He was sentenced to ten years in prison without parole, to be followed by ten years of supervised release. He is also required to register as a sex offender upon his release from custody. 

According to information presented in court, Hodges had not only received images of child pornography via the Internet and by trading child pornography with other BLN members, but he also distributed sexually explicit images of boys that he had taken with his own camera at home. At the time of his arrest and incarceration in November 2009, Hodges was tutoring children at the “Huntington Learning Center” in Alpharetta, Georgia.

“The disturbing organization known as BLN specialized in a particularly brutal and criminal abuse of children. Finding the individual members who were feeding this organization has been critical in getting them out of the community and into prison," said United States Attorney Sally Quillian Yates. "This defendant from Roswell, who was a tutor of children, will no longer live his secret and criminal life within the community.”

For more information about the investigation of these types of crimes, visit Project Safe Childhood.