Ex-Tampa Police Sergeant gets 111 years in prison for children's porn

On Friday, a judge sentenced a former Sergepa Police Sergean Sergean, who once had the city's sex crime group to more than 100 years in prison because he had child pornography.

The judge Robin Fuson condemned Paul Leo Mumford at almost 112 years, one term was at the end of the state convict guidelines, but is still a life sentence for the 64-year-old former police officer.

In a red prison suit, Mumford looked into his salt-passed hair. He looked down on the table in front of him and shook his head after Fuson injured the sentence. Mumford has been in prison since January when a six -member jury found him guilty of having the materials.

It was a kind of criminal proceedings that law enforcement officers, as Mumford once, would celebrate as a success. But now it was Mumford who worked for 29 years at the Tampa police department, including 18 months as a Sergeant who was responsible for the unity of sexual offense and was exposed to justice.

Mumford retired in 2015, but spent six years as a reserve officer and was still in this role when the examination of child pornography began in March 2021. After a random encounter outside the Amalie Arena, according to court documents and certificates, which were presented in court.

James Bowie, another former Tampa officer, went to a Lightning game in Tampa Bay and saw how Mumford led the traffic. Mumford had been Bowies Sergeant when they were assigned the Street Crimes squad.

Since then, Bowie has been working as an information security officer for the Tampa General Hospital and had extensive training in computers. Mumford asked Bowie if he could help him restore some files that were stored on an external hard drive to be stopped.

When Bowie worked at his home at his home, he clicked on a photo and appeared a picture of a young girl who started sexual activities with a group of men. He opened another file and it also showed a child who started with sexual activities.

The next morning Bowie got up, called a lawyer and explained what had happened. The lawyer organized a meeting with the Tampa police to turn the hard drive around and give Bowie an explanation.

A computer expert in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement was able to create a precise copy of the hard drive. One file contained 100 sexualized pictures of children, pornographic cartoons that show children and pictures of children who are involved in sex files with adults and other children.

Detective Mumford confronted in February 2022 in his house in South Tampa first and arrived with a search command. When she mentioned the hard drive, he said that she stopped working and he was “hacked”. When he was told by the pictures, he said he knew nothing about her.

During the process, Mumford's lawyer Chip Purcell emphasized that the hard drive was so badly damaged that the investigators needed special tools to access the data. He also claimed that Mumford was not the only person who had access to the device.

The police also found 61 Microsoft Word documents, the content of which, according to the prosecutors, comprised erotic and sexually explicit stories with children. In a story, the narrator of history described himself as an older man with gray hair, as a pensioner who worked as a reserve officer at Hockey Games, who was married twice and whose wife had three sons – all the details that met Mumford.

Mumford took up the witnesses during the trial and admitted that he wrote some, but not all who had written detectives for stories. He claimed that they were a kind of therapy.

From 10 to 16 years, he said, he applied an “extreme sexual abuse” of “a pedophile ring in the entire state of Florida”.

“I believed that it would help me to overcome the persistent effects of this abuse,” he said at the stand.

Mumford Current knew that the pictures were on the hard disk. He denied ever to have seen her.

During the conviction on Friday, Purcell said that Mumford continues to maintain his innocence. Purcell argued that the prosecutors had a single number of child pornography seats that would have a maximum punishment of 15 years. Purcell noticed that Mumford had no criminal record.

“He has an outstanding service to this community as a police officer,” said Purcell.

The deputy prosecutor Jessica Couvertier, who pursued the case, found that the indictment with which Mumford was confronted with was the same that his unity had examined. Couvertier told Fuson that the material on the hard disk contained pictures of “at least 162 identified exploited children”, but the public prosecutor submitted 100 counts, which is “uniform, how this jurisdiction works”.

Couvertier said that a representative of the Corrections Department of Corrections in Florida was hit with Mumford before submitting an investigation report before the evaluation.

“He continued to reject responsibility for the charges for which he was convicted,” said Couvertier. “He continued to assume that it was someone else in the house who found these pictures and placed these pictures on their hard drive.”

Couvertier said the report found that Mumford's actions were “a betrayal of public trust” and justified the maximum prison sentence in prison. Couvertier asked Fuson to give this lifelong sentence.

Fuson did not lead to Mumford's trial, but said he had read the experiment. He also signed the search commands to confiscate electronic devices found in Mumford's house.

“This was not just a random click on Google where these children's pornography appeared,” said Fuson. “You don't accidentally find children's pornography, you have to look for them.”

Fuson said there was no legal basis for deviating from the lowest permissible prison terms determined by the state guidelines.