GRAND RAPIDS — A Lansing man and a Tennessee man have been sentenced to decades in federal prison for conspiracy to sexually exploit children, officials said.
Michael David Bledsoe, 47, of Lansing, and Joseph Brandon, 50, of Knoxville, TN, met through an online chat group, the U.S. Attorney’s office said in a news release.
” … The two formed a criminal agreement in which Bledsoe promised to provide Brandon with social media and biographcal information about minor girls in Michigan,” the release said. “In return, Brandon promised to ‘catfish’ child pornography from the minors, by using a fake social media account where he posed as a 15-year-old girl.”
Searches turned up illicit messages between the two defendants and thousands of images and videos of children being sexually abused, the government said.
On Tuesday, May 19, U.S. District Judge Hala Jarbou sentenced Bledsoe to 27 years in prison, with five years of supervised release, court records indicate. Brandon was sentenced to a total of 55 years in prison, with 10 years of supervised release, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said. He received consecutive sentences on four counts in two separate files, according to court records and government officials.
Both men entered guilty pleas, according to court records.
FBI agents in Lansing and Knoxville were involved in the investigation, officials said.
“I don’t know how to make it any plainer than this: If you are sexually exploiting children, you will be found, prosecuted and sent to prison for a very long time,” Timothy VerHey, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Michigan, said in the news release. “Stop harming our children or your life is essentially over.”
Contact Ken Palmer at kpalmer@lsj.com. Follow him on X @KBPalm_lsj.
This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Lansing man gets decades in prison in federal child porn case
Reporting by Ken Palmer, Lansing State Journal / Lansing State Journal
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