The James Madison University professor and Charlottesville resident charged earlier this year with possessing child pornography has pleaded guilty.
Arrested in late April, William Chisholm Van Norman Jr., 68, pleaded Thursday to two felony counts under an agreement that prevents the commonwealth from securing additional indictments.
”I have accepted and signed the plea agreement,” said Michael Garrett, the retired judge hearing the case in Charlottesville Circuit Court.
According to the criminal complaint, authorities with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children learned in December from Dropbox Inc. that an image uploaded into its servers matched a known image of child pornography.
”Van Norman had the original file,” wrote Charlottesville police detective Jack Samar, “along with several others.”
While there was no suggestion that Van Norman created the image, law enforcement officers and child protection agencies charge downloaders to stem the traffic. Coders have developed “hash values,” a sort of digital fingerprint to quickly and conclusively identify known images.
”It reduces the workload and emotional stress for analysts and law enforcement of reviewing the same content repeatedly, and reduces the harm to the victim by minimizing the number of people who witness the abuse,” according to the International Hotline for Internet Providers, or INHOPE, an international consortium of agencies.
According to Samar’s complaint, the registered owner of the Dropbox account was Van Norman, who lives with his wife in Charlottesville’s Belmont neighborhood. An administrative subpoena to Ting Internet, which services the residence, identified Norman as the subscriber whose internet protocol, or IP, address matched that of the Dropbox account.
Samar obtained a search warrant for Dropbox, a move that confirmed that Van Norman had the file that triggered the storage company’s alert.
”In the original file was an image of a prepubescent female, laying on her back, with her pants pulled down to her thighs right above her knees exposing her anus and vagina,” wrote Samar. “Coming from her vagina and surrounding pubic area was a white translucent substance with the consistency of semen.”
Another concerning thing obtained by Samar’s search warrant was a short video of an adult finger repeatedly penetrating the vagina of a prepubescent girl.
In court, Van Norman kept his chin up and seemed relaxed despite waiting for more than two hours, due to a missing piece of paperwork, for his case to be called. With an arm around his wife in the gallery, he wore a pumpkin-colored pullover and maintained his composure, even when his house arrest ankle monitor began beeping before his case was called.
”Guilty, your honor,” Van Norman said after each of the two indictments, possessing child pornography and possessing an additional item of child pornography, read to him.
Reading from the plea agreement, the judge said that there was no deal on the sentence but that mitigating factors would be considered. He said that the offenses can carry a combined penalty up to 15 years.
With a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Van Norman was an associate professor at JMU specializing in Cuba and colonial Latin America as well as slavery and the African diaspora. At the time of his April 29 arrest, he was teaching both spring semester sections of a history course called, “Intro to Latin American, Latinx, and Caribbean Studies.”
Immediately after his arrest, JMU announced that Van Norman, who had been on faculty for 20 years, had been placed on administrative leave. JMU told The Daily Progress on Thursday that Van Norman’s employment there had ended.
According to his court file, Van Norman had no prior arrest record and received approval for home electronic incarceration, or HEI, the day after his arrest. On Aug. 14, he won a modification of his HEI terms, which banned him from accessing the internet, in order to participate in videoconference sessions with a certified sex offense treatment provider.
The judge in the case ordered the creation of a presentence report as well as a preparation of sentencing guidelines in anticipation of a sentencing hearing set for Jan. 22.
Source: www.dailyprogress.com