Albuquerque Man Pleads Guilty to Receiving Child Pornography

Jason Loera, a 47-year-old former political consultant, has pleaded guilty to receiving child pornography, a federal offense. Loera, a resident of Albuquerque, New Mexico, currently living in Los Angeles, California, was arrested in June 2013 on a two-count indictment charging him with receiving and possessing child pornography.

According to the indictment, Loera committed the offenses in Bernalillo County, New Mexico. The indictment was subsequently superseded twice, with the most recent superseding indictment filed on March 8, 2016. The six-count second superseding indictment charged Loera with three counts of receiving child pornography and three counts of possessing child pornography.

During a change of plea hearing, Loera entered a guilty plea to Count 3 of the second superseding indictment, charging him with receiving child pornography on April 15, 2010. In his plea agreement, Loera admitted to using his laptop computer to download an electronic file containing child pornography from the internet. The file contained 45 images of a prepubescent girl, many of which showed the girl engaged in sexually explicit conduct.

Loera also admitted to possessing child pornography on his laptop computer and two CDs when the FBI searched his residence on November 20, 2012. He admitted to having more than 600 images of child pornography, some of which depicted violence. Loera faces a statutory mandatory minimum of five years and a maximum of 20 years in prison followed by a term of supervised release to be set by the court.

Loera will be required to register as a sex offender after completing his prison sentence. The case was investigated by the Albuquerque Division of the FBI and the New Mexico Regional Computer Forensic Laboratory. It is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Dean S. Tuckman and Kristopher N. Houghton as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse.

Loera was ordered to surrender himself to the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service by June 1, 2016. He will remain in federal custody pending his sentencing hearing, which has yet to be scheduled. The case highlights the importance of Project Safe Childhood, which aims to better locate, apprehend, and prosecute individuals who exploit children via the internet, as well as to identify and rescue victims. For more information about Project Safe Childhood, please visit http://www.justice.gov/psc/.