CAMP FOSTER, Okinawa — A Navy hospitalman will spend 30 months in prison and be dishonorably discharged for using government computers to download and make photocopies of child pornography, a military judge ordered Friday.
Seaman Leslie Woods, who turns 20 next week, showed little emotion as Marine Major Charles Hale, the military judge in his general court-marital, pronounced the sentence after a daylong trial. Woods was sentenced to 45 months in prison, but under a plea agreement everything over 30 months confinement was suspended.
Hale also reduced Woods to the rank of E-1 and fined him $10,000.
Woods, from Chicago, is assigned to the U.S. Naval Hospital on Camp Lester. He pleaded guilty to using a government computer in the hospital to scan Web sites containing explicit photographs of nude boys participating in various sexual activities, according to his answers to the judge’s questions.
He also admitted downloading some of the images to a portable memory storage device and printing about 30 pictures on a government printer and taking them back to his barracks room.
In all, he said, he visited child pornography sites and downloaded the images about 15 times between May and October 2005 on the hospital computer and at the library on Camp Foster.
Woods faced a maximum sentence of 32 years in prison. Capt. Andrew D. Beckwith, the case’s lead prosecutor, asked for a sentence of five years in prison and a dishonorable discharge. As aggravating evidence, Beckwith submitted 13 photos that were found in Woods’ room, two novels containing graphic descriptions of sex between minors, and Woods’ journal, which contained poems and short stories Beckwith said detailed Woods’ fantasy life.
Defense attorney Capt. Josh Rosen said any sentence longer than 12 months in the brig “would be like throwing the lamb to the wolves.”
“Twelve months would allow him to be punished and have time to be reflective but not be corrupted by that environment,” Rosen said.
Woods, soft-spoken and calm throughout the trial, said he was a product of state foster homes and never had a caring environment until a foster family took him in while he was in high school. He said he was taken from his biological parents when he was 2 after they were charged with child neglect and he bounced through 15 foster homes before high school.
Rosen argued that Woods should have been allowed to remain in the Navy, a stable environment where he’d be “put on the path to getting help.”
Beckwith argued that Woods had blown his chance to stay in the Navy.
After the court-martial, Woods was taken to the Joint Force Brig on Camp Hansen to begin serving his sentence.
