A Covington man faces a federal sentence of imprisonment up to 75 years. A federal jury recently returned a guilty verdict in the case of a previously-convicted sex offender accused of child pornography offenses. Jarrod Sanford, 43, of Covington, was found guilty of production of child pornography, possession of child pornography, and committing a felony offense against a minor while required to register as a sex offender. Kevin G. Ritz, United States Attorney for the Western District of Tennessee, announced the verdict today.
According to information presented at trial, between July and November of 2023, Jarrod Sanford used a cell phone to take photographs of himself raping a 13-year-old child. On November 19, 2023, deputies with the Tipton County Sheriff’s Office responded to a report about the rape of a child and recovered a phone from Sanford’s residence.
Agents with the FBI Violent Crimes Against Children Task Force were able to bypass the phone’s encryption and discovered photographs that Sanford had taken during a prior rape of the child. Sanford’s DNA matched DNA samples taken from the child victim after the November rape. Sanford had previously been convicted of a sex offense, and he was on federal supervised release and the Tennessee sex offender registry at the time he committed the charged offenses.
A federal grand jury indicted Sanford for the child pornography and registry offenses in February 2024. On July 25, 2024, after a four-day trial, federal jurors convicted Jarrod Sanford as charged.
As a result of this conviction, Sanford is facing a sentence of 35 to 70 years imprisonment. Sanford faces an additional sentence of up to five years imprisonment for violation of his supervised release. A sentencing hearing before United States District Court Judge Thomas L. Parker is set for Thursday, October 31, 2024. There is no parole in the federal system.
The case was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the United States Probation Office for the Western District of Tennessee, and the Tipton County Sheriff’s Office.
United States Attorney Kevin Ritz thanked Assistant United States Attorneys Lauren Delery and Lynn Crum, who prosecuted this case, as well as the law enforcement partners who investigated the case.
