Kentucky Truck Driver, Prior Sex Offender Sentenced to 20 Years for Child Pornography

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. – A Kentucky truck driver and prior sex offender was sentenced in federal court today for transporting child pornography.

Gregory Marshall, 59, of Paducah, Kentucky, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge M. Douglas Harpool to 20 years in federal prison without parole. The court also sentenced Marshall to spend the rest of his life on supervised release following incarceration, and ordered Marshall to pay $63,000 in restitution to his victims.

On Oct. 8, 2019, Marshall pleaded guilty to transporting child pornography.

According to court documents, a Missouri State Highway Patrol trooper stopped the tractor trailer Marshall was driving on U.S. Highway 60 in Wright County, Missouri, on June 17, 2018. The trooper discovered that Marshall was a non-compliant sex offender. Marshall has three prior convictions for sexually abusing children, including sexually abusing a 4-year-old child, a 6-year-old child, and a 14-year-old child. While searching the sleeper berth of the tractor, the trooper discovered a laptop computer and an external hard drive that contained child pornography. A total of approximately 25,158 image and video files depicting child pornography were recovered.

Marshall admitted that he downloaded pornographic images of adults and children onto his laptop computer and his external hard drive. He confessed that he was in possession of images of children possibly as young as four years old and acknowledged that some of those images depict children engaged in sexual acts with adults.

This case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney James J. Kelleher. It was investigated by the Missouri State Highway Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI).

Project Safe Childhood
This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse. Led by the United States Attorneys' Offices and the Criminal Division's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state, and local resources to locate, apprehend, and prosecute individuals who sexually exploit children, and to identify and rescue victims. For more information about Project Safe Childhood, please visit www.usdoj.gov/psc . For more information about Internet safety education, please visit www.usdoj.gov/psc and click on the tab "resources."