With his sobbing family looking on in a San Francisco courtroom, former KGO radio host Bernie Ward today completed his tumble from one of the Bay Area’s most popular liberal voices on the local airwaves to a pariah caught up in the world of online child pornography.

Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker sentenced Ward to seven years and three months in federal prison, calling the disgraced celebrity a “troubled individual” whose downfall is a “personal tragedy.” Ward now must turn himself in to U.S. Marshals by noon Friday to begin his prison term.

[…]

But federal prosecutors urged Walker to sentence Ward to nine years in prison, describing his conduct in recent court papers as “amoral, universally unacceptable and aberrant.” The government’s court documents alleged that Ward possessed images of sex acts on children as young as three years old, and revealed his online exchanges with the dominatrix in which he discussed his sexual attraction to children.

“These images depicted these minors suffering the most horrific torment,” Steve Grocki, a Justice Department lawyer who led the Ward prosecution, said to Walker. “He traded in the currency of human suffering.”

IMHO, he should have gotten more.

Dozens of Ward’s supporters wrote letters to the judge, extolling the talk show host and urging leniency. At the same time, groups aligned against child abuse have pressed for the harshest possible sentence for Ward to make an example of him in the fight against online child porn.

It figures.

AWB

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