Bourbon County Man Sentenced to 360 Months for Producing Child Pornography

 LEXINGTON, Ky. – A Paris, Ky., man, Johnathan Scott Mason, 27, was sentenced to 360 months on Wednesday, by U.S. District Judge Karen Caldwell, for the production of child pornography. 

According to his guilty plea agreement, in March 2020, law enforcement officers were made aware of Mason’s activity on the social media application, Kik.  On this app, Mason expressed a sexual interest in children and said that he had sexually explicit images of minors, which he had produced.  Mason admitted that he knew that the visual depictions were produced and transported using the Internet.                       

Mason pleaded guilty in January 2021.

Carlton S. Shier, IV, Acting United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Kentucky; Jerry Templet, Special Agent in Charge of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI); and Lt. Colonel Phillip Burnett, Acting Commissioner of the Kentucky State Police; jointly announced the sentence.

Under federal law, Mason name must serve 85 percent of his prison sentence; and upon his release from prison, he will be under the supervision of the U.S. Probation Office for life.

The investigation was conducted by Department of Homeland Security-HSI and KSP-Electronic Crimes Branch.  The United States was represented by Assistant U.S. Attorney David Marye. 

This case was prosecuted as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice. Led by U.S. Attorneys’ Offices and the Criminal Division’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS), Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state and local resources to better locate, apprehend and prosecute individuals who exploit children via the Internet as well as to identify and rescue victims.  For more information about Project Safe Childhood, please visit www.projectsafechildhood.gov.