10-years prison in park pedophile, child-porn case

Samuel Clinton Thompson arrived at an Auburn park expecting to meet up with a 13-year-old girl for sex. He'd placed an online advertisement seeking to meet and teach a "younger lover" but instead was met and arrested on his arrival at the park by undercover Placer County Sheriff's Office detectives. They'd answered the ad, posing as a 13-year-old girl. After the arrest, investigators quickly learned that Thompson, 34 and a resident of Grass Valley, was already deep into the federal court system for downloading child porn files. Thompson had pleaded guilty four months before the Auburn bust to allegations that he had used a peer-to-peer file-sharing software program to download child pornography files from the internet in 2012 and 2013. Thompson was on on supervised pretrial release for the guilty plea when he became involved in more criminal activity involving minors. He was one of three men — the other two were from Roseville — who traveled separately to Auburn in September 2016 for what each thought was going to be a sexual encounter with a young girl but instead were ushered in handcuffs to a jail cell. Homeland Security agent Tom Osborne said the Thompson case was an example of cooperation between the Sheriff's Office, Homeland Security Investigations and the agency "to protect the innocence of children." "Thompson continued to pose a threat to minors by attempting to contact a teen for sex while awaiting sentence for child pornography charges," Osborne said. This past week, Thompson was sentenced in Sacramento by U.S. District Court Judge Garland Burrell to 10 years and four months in prison for receipt of child pornography and attempting to use the internet to entice a child to engage in sexual activity. Both cases were prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Morris.