Story Created:
Aug 2, 2010 at 7:48 PM PST
Story Updated:
Aug 2, 2010 at 7:48 PM PST
A Los Angeles man who worked as an English teacher in Bangkok will spend 25 years in federal prison for traveling to Thailand to have sex with minors, prosecutors said Monday.
Steven Erik Prowler, 61, was re-sentenced in U.S. District Court in downtown Los Angeles after prosecutors appealed a 10-year sentence previously handed down in the case.
U.S. District Judge Consuelo B. Marshall told the defendant on Friday that he was receiving the quarter-century sentence due, in part, to the nature of his conduct, which she described as particularly "depraved.''
Prowler pleaded guilty in 2007 to one count each of traveling abroad with the intent to engage in illicit sexual conduct and illicit sexual contact with a minor in a foreign place.
Prowler admitted that he had oral sex with a boy he knew was about 15 in April 2005. Prowler paid the teen the equivalent of about $6, according to his plea agreement.
He also acknowledged engaging in sex acts with other minors during another trip to Thailand the previous year.
Prowler was arrested in May 2005 in Bangkok after the Royal Thai Police, acting on a tip, saw two youths leaving his apartment. He was jailed there on local charges, then returned to the United States in immigration custody in May 2006.
After another judge sentenced Prowler to 10 years in prison, the Justice Department appealed, and the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the sentence and remanded the case to the lower court for re-sentencing.
Following Prowler's arrest, a search of his apartment revealed more than 100 photos of naked teenage boys, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.
Additionally, investigators recovered numerous handwritten journals in which Prowler described in graphic detail the sexual acts he performed with numerous boys in Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Mexico over a five-year period, prosecutors said.
"This sentence is a powerful reminder about the consequences facing Americans who travel overseas seeking to sexually exploit innocent children,'' said John Morton, director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
"Stopping these deviant and criminal acts is a priority that requires aggressive action,'' he said. "ICE Homeland Security Investigations will continue to work tirelessly with foreign law enforcement officials and non- governmental organizations around the world to vindicate the rights of these young victims, no matter how destitute they are or how far they live from our shores.''
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