APPEALS COURT UPHOLDS CONVICTION OF BOISE SEX OFFENDER

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction of a Boise man who produced a pornographic video of a 2-year-old toddler and shared it on the Internet with a sex offender in Canada.

Jerry Levis Banks, Sr., 56, was sentenced in April 2007 to life in prison plus 60 years. He received the additional 60 years for transporting child pornography between Boise and a person in California whom he thought was a 12-year-old girl, and for possessing child pornography on eight separate storage media, including computers, CDs and a portable “jump drive” at his office adjacent to his home on Vista Avenue.

Since he was already a registered sex offender and was convicted of producing child pornography, the life sentence was mandatory. There is no parole in the federal system so Banks will serve his full sentence. He previously served 12 years in Idaho state prison for molesting an 11-year-old boy and 12 months in Washington state for a 1986 child abuse conviction.

Testimony during his six-day trial in November of 2006 showed that Banks was the operator of a WinMX peer-to-peer file sharing channel on the Internet called “Kid Sex and Incest,” which is now defunct. Testimony at trial showed that Banks used that forum to contact other like-minded persons around the world and exchanged sexually explicit images of minors with them.

The investigation began in mid-May 2005 when agents in Edmonton, Alberta, arrested a Canadian citizen for child exploitation offenses. That resulted in an international probe which has since produced more than 60 arrests in Canada, the United States, Great Britain, Europe and Australia, and more than 20 children being rescued from situations in which they were being sexually exploited, according to Detective Randy Wickins of the Edmonton Police Services.

“This is truly a landmark achievement in our efforts in Idaho to thwart the use of the internet to spread the evil exploitation of children,” U.S. Attorney Tom Moss said.

The case was investigated jointly by the Edmonton Police Services in Alberta, Canada, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation with the assistance of the High Technology Investigative Unit of the U.S. Department of Justice, Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section. It was prosecuted by James M. Peters, Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Idaho, and Alexandra Gelber, a trial attorney from the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.