A Temple doctoral student convicted of possessing and attempting to posses child pornography is scheduled to appear in court for sentencing later this month.
A jury found Roderick Vosburgh, who also formerly taught at La Salle University, Ursinus College and Delaware County Community College, guilty on one count of attempted possession of child pornography and one count of possession of child pornography after a 2006 FBI sting operation aimed at combating the common crime.
“[Stings are] usually fairly easy to prove because you’ve got a lot of evidence that can be tracked back to the defendant,” said Alex Muentz, an adjunct criminal justice professor who worked on an Internet child pornography case as a law student. “Also, I found that juries and judges are less sympathetic in sex offender cases.”
According to Cornell University Law School’s Web site, Vosburgh could potentially face up to 10 years in prison for the charges.
Anna Durbin, Vosburgh’s attorney, declined to comment on the record, citing that she recently filed a motion for acquittal.
According to the government’s response to the defendant’s motion for acquittal, which details the charges against Vosburgh in chronological order, an undercover FBI agent created a post on a child pornography message board called “Ranchi” in October 2006.
The post advertised a video of a 4-year-old girl engaging in “hardcore” sexual acts with her father and contained hyperlinks, which did not actually contain pornography, but were instead routed back to the agent’s computer.
On the evening of Oct. 26, 2006, the agent linked three separate attempts to download the advertised video to Vosburgh’s personal computer through his IP address.
Upon a warranted search of Vosburgh’s residence after his IP address was linked to the undercover post, FBI agents found two thumbnails of child pornographic images on an external hard drive that also contained academic documents with Vosburgh’s name.
The government’s response to the motion for acquittal described the thumbnails as images of nude prepubescent girls posing provocatively.
Vosburgh also faced charges of destroying media to obstruct evidence and prevent seizure, but they were dropped in late 2006.
During the 27 years he worked as a customs special agent, adjunct criminal justice professor Joseph Alkus participated in multiple sting operations, including cases similar to Vosburgh’s.
He said that stings are common and important in cases of child pornography, citing a National Center for Missing and Exploited Children statistic that lists 1,830 child pornography cases reported the week of Jan. 7, 2008, alone.
Agencies like the FBI use special filtering methods to ensure that innocent people do not become trapped in these operations, Alkus said.
“A sting operation is always an effective tool to try to ferret out these kinds of activities because they operate under a guise of darkness like organized crime does,” he said. “They’re not out in the open, in the daylight, and law enforcement has to be aggressive in order to detect them.”
He said that the process is by no means casually delineated or haphazard.
“The chance that someone innocent [would] be caught up in this kind of sting is more remote,” he said. “They go into places where people who are trafficking or conversing in child pornography exist and they just lay the opportunity there for them to look at it. They don’t entice them to take it. They just put it out there and then see what happens.”
Alkus and Muentz said that the IP address is considerable evidence against Vosburgh.
“Nothing is 100 percent, but I don’t think they’ll be able to disprove it,” Muentz said. “There may be something specific that they know that I don’t, but normally that’s pretty good evidence.”
Vosburgh could not be reached for comment via e-mail to his TUmail address last week.
Morgan A. Zalot can be reached at morgan.zalot@temple.edu.
Be the first to comment