Local man sentenced to 78 months for child porn

A Gallupville man has been sentenced to 78 months in prison after pleading guilty to possessing child pornography in February.

John C. Hotaling, 49, will participate in a sex offender program, register as a sex offender and will not have unsupervised contact with minors. His computer equipment must also be forfeited.

In early 2005, an investigative team including the New York State Police and the FBI's Capital Region Predator Task Force found hundreds of images of child pornography on Hotaling's home computer in Sharon Springs.

The images, which Hotaling altered, contained photos of the heads of six underaged girls digitally pasted onto adult women performing sex acts. The images of the adults were found using the Internet, and the photos from which Hotaling cropped the young girls' faces were obtained from digital cameras and computers, including the computer of one of the girls' families that Hotaling was repairing at the time.

The girls were born in 1987, 1989, 1990 and 1991, making all of them underage in 2005 when the photos were confiscated, according to a statement by the Albany Field Division of the FBI.