Prosecutors Move to Seize House in Child Pornography Case

Prosecutors in the Eastern District of Kentucky don’t just want to put Joseph Robert Leitner in prison for years. The federal government wants his house.

Leitner, 62, pleaded guilty last week to charges that he possessed more than 30,000 images of child pornography, and he agreed to give up his home in the Chevy Chase subdivision of Lexington, court records show.

The property forfeiture marked the first time that prosecutors in the Eastern District of Kentucky have seized a home in a child pornography investigation. The forfeiture of houses more often occurs in drug prosecutions.

“He used his house as a protective shield to allow his criminal activity to go undetected,” said Kyle Edelen, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Prosecutors, he said, based the forfeiture decision on the number of images and the frequency of the downloads.

More on this story in The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times.

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