RUTLAND — A former White River Junction man will spend eight years in prison after pleading guilty in federal court to distributing child pornography online, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Chief U.S. District Judge Geoffrey W. Crawford this week ordered Tony Cuthbertson, 50, of St. Johnsbury, Vt., to spend 96 months in prison, as well as a 10-year term of supervised release. The sentence follows Cuthbertson’s guilty plea to one count of distributing child pornography that had been adapted to depict an “identifiable minor,” according to the release.
Prosecutors said that, in September and October of 2017, Cuthbertson uploaded images of identifiable children, which he had cropped to look sexually explicit, onto online chat rooms for users to see.
Cuthbertson lived in White River Junction at the time, and his online activity was initially detected by Lebanon police, Chief Richard Mello said in an email Friday. He said the police department, which is a member of the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, received a an online tip about the photos in October 2017. After an investigation, police found that Cuthbertson was behind the images, and they forwarded the case to authorities in Vermont, Mello said.