POLK COUNTY, Fla. – A Florida man convicted on child pornography charges after tweeting explicit images has been sentenced years after his arrest.
On Aug. 18, 2017, Polk County Sheriff’s Office officials arrested then-20-year-old Gibsonton resident Marchaun Browning on charges of distributing and possessing child pornography.
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On Tuesday, more than four years later, U.S. District Judge Mary S. Scriven sentenced Browning to five years in federal prison, the minimum sentence.
According to a report from the U.S. Department of Justice, Browning was arrested for tweeting out child sex abuse images from several different Twitter accounts he created. The tweets he sent tagged the accounts of “several elected officials, media outlets and public figures,” including a Bay News 9 anchor in Tampa. The tweets also contained messages directed at the owners of these accounts, the report said.
Those events occurred in July of 2017 and set off an investigation carried out by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with assistance from PCSO.
Court records state law enforcement officers executed a search warrant at Browning’s dwelling and gathered evidence from his electronic devices to find more than 160 images and one video depicting the sexual abuse of children. Browning faced federal charges.
Browning plead guilty on April 21 and could have walked out with a maximum sentence of 30 years. Some of the child pornography images in his possession included victims as young as toddlers, according to court records.
His sentence is to be followed by 10 years of supervised release.