By Jamie Satterfield
News Sentinel
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — When it came to this 28-year-old child pornography peddler, Merle Haggard said it best -- “Momma Tried.”
“Talking to him about the Lord didn’t help,” Becky Prater testified Monday on behalf of her son, Gabriel Todd Prater. “So my husband and I prayed God would take him places he needed to go (to redeem himself).”
The place Todd Prater is now headed is federal prison for nearly 13 years. He was sent there Monday by U.S. District Judge Thomas Phillips after the judge heard testimony that Prater had tried via the Internet to solicit sex with what he thought was the 7-year-old daughter of the person with whom he was sending child pornography.
Assistant Federal Defender Kim Tollison sent Prater’s adoptive mother to the witness stand in a bid to convince Phillips to consider a bit of judicial mercy after Tollison failed in his bid to show that even the panel that created penalty ranges for child pornography cases was uneasy about the sometimes hefty prison terms being meted out as a result.
Prater first came under law enforcement scrutiny in April 2008 when a Johnson City woman complained that he had sent her child pornographic images during an online chat.
Knoxville Police Department Investigator Tom Evans said the complaint was forwarded to the Internet Crimes Against Children task force of which he is a founding member.
Because Prater had expressed an interest in incest in his chat with the Johnson City woman, Evans said he pretended to be a friend of that woman and parent of a 7-year-old girl while online with Prater.
“He tells his desire to have sex with my fictitious 7-yearold daughter,” Evans testified. “During the chat, Mr. Prater would (repeatedly) go back to wanting to have sex with a seven-year-old.”
But efforts to lure Prater to show up for an actual meeting failed, largely because Prater didn’t have a valid license or a working vehicle, Evans said. Police later raided the bedroom where Prater lived with his adoptive parents in Morgan County and discovered a cache of more than 1,000 images of child pornography.
Tollison argued Monday that because Prater agreed to admit distributing more than 100 images, he should not rack up additional penalty for the hundreds of other images he had at his disposal.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Frank Dale disagreed, arguing the entire cache was “part and parcel” of Prater’s crimes. Phillips sided with Dale, ordering Prater to spend 151 months in prison.
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