A Shelton man appeared in court Tuesday (March 21) after state police accused him of having more than 250 images and a dozen videos depicting child pornography on computers in his home.
Richard Dore, 58, was charged March 9 with first-degree possession of child pornography and promoting a minor in an obscene performance.
Dore’s lawyer, Gregory Cerritelli, said Monday that he could not comment the allegations because he had not yet read the arrest warrant.
He said Dore intends to plead not guilty in the case.
Dore appeared at Superior Court in Derby Tuesday, where the case was transferred to Superior Court in Milford, which handles more serious cases.
Both of the charges Dore faces are felonies punishable by up to 20 years behind bars.
Dore was released after posting $150,000 bond in the case.
An arrest warrant written by Trooper David Aresco of the state police Computer Crimes and Electronic Evidence Laboratory says Dore’s arrest was the result of cops searching file sharing networks on the Internet for child pornography.
According to the warrant, state police found several videos depicting child pornography linked to an IP address in Shelton on one of the file sharing networks last year.
The warrant says state police got a court order for Comcast to divulge the subscriber information from the IP address.
The company told police the address was assigned to Dore’s account.
State police then got a warrant to search Dore’s home.
When police were searching the home May 16, 2016, the warrant says Dore admitted downloading “illegal pornography.”
According to the warrant, Dore showed state police the computers he was using to download pornography from the Internet.
“Richard stated that he has downloaded pornography involving kids under the age of 16 but that he was not looking for that type of pornography,” the warrant says. “Richard stated that if he downloaded child pornography he would just delete it.”
The warrant says Aresco told Dore police might be able to recover the specific words he used to search for pornography. At that point, the warrant says Dore told the state trooper “he did use search terms that could be used to find child pornography.”
Aresco asked Dore “why he would use search terms associated with child pornography if it was something he was not interested in.”
“Richard stated he did it out of curiosity and that he used bad judgment,” the warrant says.
When searching his computers, state police also discovered a file showing 60 terms Dore had allegedly used to search for the videos and pictures.
Several of the terms are “used to locate files of suspected child pornography through peer-to-peer file sharing networks,” Aresco wrote in the warrant.
A search of one of Dore’s computers found 260 images and 14 videos depicting suspected child pornography.
