Port Charlotte man sentenced to 6 1/2 years for possessing child porn

A Port Charlotte man was sentenced Monday to six years and six months in federal prison for possessing child pornography.

Marquise Thomas, 34, was sentenced for “possessing and accessing with the intent to view images and videos depicting the sexual abuse of a child,” according to the State Attorney’s Office. The court also sentenced Thomas to a life term of supervised release and ordered him to register as a sex offender. Thomas was found guilty after a bench trial on May 20.

On Jan. 24, 2019, the FBI searched Thomas’s home and seized his laptop computers and his phone. A forensic analysis of the electronics revealed more than 100 images and 35 videos of children being sexually abused. Thomas had saved the images on his cellphone, and the forensic analysis recovered the videos of the sexual abuse of children that Thomas had accessed with the intent to view them before deleting them on his laptops.