"I love my son, and I will be there for him as long as I can," Adelaide Erb said with tears in her eyes as Lycoming County Judge Joy Reynolds McCoy sentenced Jay Kenneth Hartsock Jr. to state prison Friday morning for viewing child pornography and failing to comply with the registration requirements of a sexual offender.
Hartsock, 36, who has been incarcerated in the Lycoming County Prison since July 2009, will spend between 35 and 70 years in a state correctional institution.
Following a two-day trial in April, jurors found Hartsock guilty of 23 felony counts of possession of child pornography and one felony count of criminal use of the computer used to download the images.
In a separate non-jury trial held in November, Lycoming County Judge Dudley N. Anderson found Hartsock guilty of failing to register his address with state authorities, also a felony offense for a sexual offender.
Assistant District Attorney Melissa Kalaus, who prosecuted the case, sought a mandatory 25 to 50 years sentence for one of the 23 counts and argued the sentences for the remaining counts should run consecutively and amount to the equivalent of a life sentence based on the nature of the offense and Hartsock's prior convictions.
Kalaus said was convicted of the statutory rape of a 13-year-old in 1993.
"This is not somebody who needs to out on the streets," she said. "Notably disturbing is that this is a second offense."
Public defender Robin Buzas, who represented Hartsock, argued against running consecutive sentences citing multiple images of the same girl, the age of the girls and the fact that the images were downloaded to temporary Internet files rather than a hard drive as "mitigating circumstances."
"Obviously looking at girls of this age is a crime," Buzas said. "But they're not 5-year-olds. They're not babies."
Buzas also noted Hartsock likely would serve 80 percent of the mandatory sentence and called anything beyond that "excessive and unnecessary."
Before handing down the lengthy sentence, McCoy acknowledged the mitigating circumstances raised by Buzas but ultimately decided to impose a longer sentence than the mandatory in an effort to keep Hartsock off the streets until he would no longer present "a danger to young girls."
"I know the children (in the images) were not 5, and they were not babies. But they were pre-pubescent," McCoy said. "Prior incarceration did not get through to him."
McCoy also determined Hartsock to be a sexually violent predator, and as such, he must register with state police as a sex offender for the rest of his life in accordance with Megan's Law.
