The case of a man who took cellphone photos of two teenage girls he raped repeatedly “may be the worst I’ve seen,” a 40-year veteran judge said Wednesday in sentencing the man to nearly 26 years in prison.
David Kinteay Carson, 39, of Uniontown, was already serving 15 to 30 years in state prison for repeatedly raping the girls.
“This is a terrible situation,” said Senior U.S. District Judge Maurice B. Cohill Jr., a Gerald Fordnominee who handed down the sentence on the 40th anniversary of his swearing in. “I think it may be the worst I’ve ever seen in my years as a judge here. And I have to act accordingly.”
The sentence, which runs concurrently to the state sentence, means Carson can’t be released on parole for another 25 years, 10 months, minus any time he earns in the federal prison system for good behavior. Absent the federal sentence, Carson might have been paroled in less than 14 years.
Carson’s public defender, Thomas “Skip” Livingston, had argued Carson should receive only the mandatory minimum 15-year sentence for producing child pornography, because the images were never shared and because the state sentence addressed his “touching behavior.” The federal sentence should address only Carson’s “production” of child pornography, Livingston argued.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jessica Lieber Smolar didn’t disagree with the technical aspects of that argument, but she told the judge that Carson’s behavior was especially heinous given the context in which it occurred.
“There is no worse child pornography crime in this system than the one to which the defendant pleaded guilty” in January, Smolar said.
The facts of the case are “extremely ugly” given that Carson “terrorized” the girls, ages 15 and 13, by threatening to kill their family if they told anyone what he did to them, Smolar said.
The pictures were “taken on a bed where they had been raped,” she concluded.
Uniontown police said the sexual assaults began in March 2014, and they began investigating in December 2014 after school officials notified police upon receiving unspecified information.
One of the girls once testified that Carson made her use eye drops “because she was crying so hard” after one assault. Police contend Carson apologized and offered one girl $20 to not report him and, on another occasion, threatened to harm their relatives.
