KANSAS CITY – A Gladstone, Mo., man who is a prior sex offender was sentenced in federal court on January 14 for receiving child pornography.
Shawn D. Clutts, 37, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Howard F. Sachs to 15 years in federal prison without parole. The court also sentenced Clutts to 25 years of supervised release following incarceration and ordered him to pay $10,000 in restitution to his victims and a $5,000 assessment.
Clutts was sentenced as a prior sex offender due to his prior felony conviction for statutory rape and statutory sodomy for the sexual abuse of a teenage girl he met on the internet. Approximately a year after completing his state sentence in that case, Clutts was arrested in this case.
On Aug. 8, 2024, Clutts pleaded guilty to receiving child pornography. Clutts admitted that he had images and videos of child pornography on his cell phone when he was stopped by a Missouri State Highway Patrol trooper for an expired registration on his Honda Accord on June 22, 2023.
Investigators found 131 videos and 49 images of child pornography on Clutts’s cell phone. These included depictions of sadomasochistic behavior, infants, and toddlers. Clutts also had previously downloaded hundreds of files of child pornography utilizing the MEGA application; some of those videos were still on his cell phone. MEGA is an internet-based file-sharing application whereby users can share “links” with other users to files they have saved within MEGA. The link allows the other user access to the MEGA folder of the sender and files located within that folder.
Clutts also admitted that he engaged in chats with another user over the internet on the Kik application, in which he discussed purchasing child pornography from this user through MEGA links. Clutts had purchased child pornography from this individual before.
This case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Kenneth W. Borgnino. It was investigated by the Missouri State Highway Patrol.
Project Safe Childhood
This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse. Led by the United States Attorneys’ Offices and the Criminal Division’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state, and local resources to locate, apprehend, and prosecute individuals who sexually exploit children, and to identify and rescue victims.