San Francisco — Federal prosecutors are recommending a nine-year prison sentence for Bernie Ward, the former liberal talk show host who admitted distributing child pornography, and belittle his claim that he was just doing research for a book.
“No evidence supports (Ward’s) contention that he engaged in his behavior to further a journalistic investigation,” Justice Department lawyers said in court papers filed Wednesday in San Francisco. In fact, they said, new evidence shows that Ward shared graphic images of child pornography with a group of 10 people for about a year.
Ward’s lawyer proposed a five-year sentence Thursday and disputed the prosecutors’ statements. He said Ward’s involvement in child pornography began as a research project and “lost its focus” because of an “inexplicable error of judgment” caused, at least in part, by a drinking problem.
Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker is scheduled to sentence Ward next Thursday. Ward has been released on $250,000 bail but is confined to his San Francisco home, with electronic monitoring.
Ward, 57, a former Roman Catholic priest, spent 24 years with KGO-AM in San Francisco, first as a reporter and later as the host of a talk show that ran three hours every weeknight. The station – which nicknamed him the “lion of the left” – fired him in December after his federal grand jury indictment was unsealed.
Ward was charged with two counts of distributing and one count of receiving Internet images of child pornography. He pleaded guilty in May to one charge of distributing child pornography in exchange for dismissal of the other two charges.
As part of his plea agreement, Ward admitted that he had sent between 15 and 150 pornographic images by e-mail.
Ward maintains that he downloaded the images as part of his research for a book on hypocrisy among Americans who preach morality. Under the federal law, however, motive and intent are irrelevant, and possessing, receiving or distributing child pornography is a felony punishable by at least five years in prison. The maximum term for Ward’s conviction is 20 years.
Ward, who holds a master’s degree in theology, spent two years as a priest before leaving to get married. He worked for three years as a legislative assistant for then-Rep. Barbara Boxer, D-San Francisco, before joining KGO in 1985. A talk show host since 1992, he discussed news and politics on his nightly program and religious issues on “God Talk” on Sunday mornings.
He was prosecuted after a woman in Oakdale (Stanislaus County) contacted police in 2005 and said an ex-priest, later identified as Ward, had been having sex chats with her by e-mail and had sent her a photo showing child pornography.
Police got a search warrant for the online account and found about 100 images showing minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct, prosecutors said in court papers.
Ward’s lawyer has described the online conversations with the woman as role-playing.
In arguing for a nine-year sentence, prosecutors said many of the images Ward distributed to a group of about 10 people showed 3-year-old children being subjected to “sadistic and masochistic abuse.” They urged Walker to look at the pictures before sentencing Ward.
Prosecutors also quoted an unidentified friend of Ward’s who said the talk-show host burst into tears during an April 2005 conversation and told him, “I’ve been looking at things I’m not supposed to on the Internet.”
The friend said Ward specified that he had been looking at pictures of children for a year, prosecutors said.
Ward “continues to assert he only engaged in his criminal conduct to research people on the Internet who trafficked in child pornography,” prosecutors said, referring to his statements to court probation officers preparing a sentencing report. They said he had told the probation officers that “he was eager to earn a book deal with his idea and was blinded by greed.”
Doron Weinberg, Ward’s lawyer, said Thursday that his client’s transgression began as a legitimate book project.
At worst, Weinberg said in his court filing, “Mr. Ward’s ‘distribution’ of child pornography involved no more than the noncommercial transfer of a few dozen images to other willing adult recipients, all of whom appear to have been more regularly involved in this conduct.” None of the other recipients has been prosecuted, he said.
Ward, he said, “engaged and opened the minds of tens of thousands of listeners” in a career that is now in ruins. After prison, he said, Ward will be a registered sex offender, “with few options and little possibility of restoring much of the life he has heretofore lived.”