A former diving coach at the Berkeley Preparatory school in Tampa, Florida has had his sentence reduced dramatically in a child pornography case.
Jay Goldstein was charged with 100 counts of possessing child pornography and was originally sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2013, according to TampaBay.com.
But last week, Goldstein was resentenced to 15 years, per The Tampa Bay Times, and the circuit judge immediately suspended his sentence. That means Goldstein will only serve his 15 years if he commits another offense.
The resentencing is part of a group of cases that an appeals court has overturned, claiming that the presiding judge had “fundamentally erred,” according to The Tampa Bay Times.
Goldstein originally accepted a plea bargain that would have made his maximum sentence 10 years. TampaBay.com reports that the plea deal was based on Goldstein’s previously clean criminal record, the fact that two doctors pronounced him low-risk, and an investigation that didn’t suggest any of the children in the child porn images were students at Berkeley, where Goldstein coached.
But Circuit Judge Chet Tharpe rejected the plea as too lenient, and sentenced Goldsten to two decades in prison based on the fear that he would break the law in the future:
“I’m not willing to take the risk that at some point in time Mr. Goldstein, or others that have a proclivity for child pornography, bondage, 8-year-olds, that’s not at some point in time going to offend by actually sexually abusing a child,” the judge said in 2013.
Goldstein was imprisoned for about two years before his resentencing. He is now out on bond and his new sentence will put him under sex offender probation and ankle monitoring.
