Steven Walski (Photo courtesy of Baxter County Sheriff’s Office)
A Mountain Home man facing 99 counts of possessing child pornography formally entered a guilty plea to an amended charge during a session of Baxter County Circuit Court Monday.
Thirty-five-year-old Steven Walski was sentenced to 10 years in prison, with seven to serve and three suspended. He will also be required to register as a sex offender during his lifetime.
The state dropped 98 of the possessing child pornography counts and Walski pled to the one remaining count.
Gray Dellinger of Melbourne, one of the attorneys representing Walski, asked the court to consider allowing his client to remain under house arrest at his parents’ home until a bed opened in the chronically overcrowded state prison system. Circuit Judge John Putman said it was not his policy to authorize such an arrangement because of past bad experiences. He said, however, he would consider the request and issue a ruling.
Walski, who owned a barber shop in downtown Mountain Home when he was arrested in early November 2021, was taken into custody based on an investigation that was launched after a “cybertip” was received by local police from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that led to the discovery of several downloads of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) traced to Walski.
A large majority of the images were reported to have depicted nude young females in sexual contact with adults or who were “sexually posed.”
The case had been delayed by a motion to suppress evidence. A hearing was held on the motion in mid-July last year. Circuit Judge John Putman filed an order on February 3 saying the court could not make a decision on the issues involved in the defense motion based only on evidence presented in the original hearing and asked that a date for a supplemental hearing be set.
It was set for late last month, but one of Walski’s attorneys, Emily Reed of Mountain Home, announced the second hearing had become unnecessary because Walski had opted to take a plea in the case.
One of the basic issues the circuit court had been asked to decide is whether the initial detection of the child porn images on Walski’s computer had been done by legal means. If the court had granted the motion, it would likely have meant that all evidence in the case could have been thrown out.
The defense had argued in its 19-page motion that information in the affidavit used to obtain the initial search warrant in Baxter County was deficient in several areas and, therefore, invalid. There were several subsequent warrants issued for searches during the investigation that eventually implicated Walski and led to his arrest.
The state had responded asking for the suppression motion to be dismissed, contending the warrants issued during the investigation of the case were valid and that the evidence obtained as a result of those warrants was gathered legally.
The possibility that there had been downloads of CSAM material on electronic devices belonging to Walski was detected and reported by Synchronoss, a company that provides services to providers such as AT&T and Verizon. When suspect material is detected, the company’s automatic system reports the finding to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and, from there, NCMEC sends a “cybertip” to local law enforcement.
Courts across the county have fairly consistently ruled that companies such as Synchronoss do not need a search warrant to monitor the accounts of those people using its system. Users sign an agreement acknowledging they understand it is a violation of that agreement to send or receive Child Sexual Abuse Material and that their account will be monitored to detect such material.
In many court rulings, it has been pointed out that child pornography can be identified “with almost absolute certainty” using computer programs utilized by provides such as Synchronoss and that a “private search” for such material by a corporate entity such as Synchronoss is not a violation of a person’s Fourth Amendment rights.
In Walski’s’s case, the suspect material was identified by electronic tools such as the Image Detection Filtering Process.
A recent ruling by the Arkansas Court of Appeals in another child porn case addressed some of the basic issues and arguments contained in Walski’s motion to suppress. The court did not buy the arguments.
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