PITTSBURGH,None — A former Canadian police officer who traveled to western Pennsylvania after expressing his desire in an online fetish chat room to experience the "gift of a 14-year-old's virginity" was sentenced to 10 1/2 years in federal prison in an online teen sex sting.
Paul Maher, 60, of Richmond, Ontario, plans to petition the Canadian government to allow him to serve most of his jail time there after a federal judge in Pittsburgh imposed the sentence Tuesday, according to his federal public defender, Thomas Livingston.
Maher pleaded guilty in October to two counts, traveling with intent to engage in illicit sexual conduct, and coercion and enticement of a person he believed to be a 14-year-old girl. He faced a mandatory minimum 10-year sentence and could have received up to 11 years and three months in prison under sentencing guidelines.
Maher will get credit for being incarcerated since his arrest on June 27, 2008, after he traveled nearly 600 miles to a Westmoreland County motel but didn't go through with a meeting he had arranged with the "teen," who was actually an undercover police officer from Mount Pleasant, a borough about 30 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.
"Your criminal conduct in this case was depraved and vile," U.S. District Judge Terrence McVerry said before sentencing Maher, who opted not to address the judge. "You are without doubt a sexual predator.
"Is your fleeting gratification really more important than a young girl's future?" the judge asked.
Livingston declined comment after the sentencing and Maher, white-haired with a gray goatee, was led through a courtroom exit away from reporters. Wearing an orange prison jumpsuit and matching slip-on shoes below his leg irons, Maher said little during the 35-minute hearing, answering most of the judge's questions "yes, sir" or "yes, your honor."
Maher was an officer with the Ottawa Police Service from 1974 to 1988, then unemployed four years before working as a security guard, a private investigator, and at other jobs.
A spokesman with the Ottawa Police Service refused to comment on Maher's employment and referred questions on a pending weapons charge those police filed against Maher to the Ottawa Provincial Court, where officials did not immediately return a call for comment. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Soo Song said only that the charge resulted from a gun Canadian authorities found when they searched Maher's home and his computer as part of the sex sting investigation.
Authorities also found pictures of a minor "photoshopped" onto the bodies of naked women, among other child-sex images on the computer, Song said.
Maher was 56 when he began chatting with the undercover officer in a Yahoo! Messenger fetish room using the screen name "chancemaycome" in October 2007. On other occasions, Maher identified himself as "Pablo Mendez."
An FBI complaint said Maher graphically described sex acts he wanted to perform with the girl and sent Web cam images of him performing a sex act, and told the girl he wanted to take 10,000 pictures of her when he arrived in Pennsylvania.
Maher made a motel reservation, but never showed up after phoning a cooperating witness to say he believed he was under law enforcement surveillance. Maher was arrested later that day in New York in the vehicle authorities saw him in near the motel. He also had a Web cam in the vehicle.
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