A Georgia teacher has been sentenced to 90 months in prison and 25 years of supervised release for possessing child pornography.
According to a statement from the U.S. Attorney's Office in Georgia's Middle District, 44-year-old Robert Anthony Smith came up in a Homeland Security Investigation after the agency was notified by the New Zealand Digital Child Exploitation Team in August 2017.
The U.S. Department of Justice said that Smith was revealed as a user of the forum known as "Chatstep" who used the platform to post images and videos depicting the sexual exploitation of children.
Federal search warrants for Smith's home lead to the seizure of six computers, an iPad, iPhone and two external hard drives. Of those, three devices contained 454 images and 19 videos of minors being sexually exploited - some of the victims under the age of 12. Some of those victims were infants and toddlers being sexually abused.
At the time of his arrest, Smith was a special education teacher at Central High School in Macon.
"Here we have a teacher, charged with protecting young people, viewing hundreds of scenes of children being sexually exploited in the most heinous ways imaginable," U.S. Attorney Charles Peeler said. "The sexual exploitation of children is a crime that will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law."
In addition to his sentence, Smith will be required to pay restitution to the victims identified in the images he possessed. He will also be required to register as a sex offender.
