What Happened When Jackson Went Easy on This Sex Offender

In text messages, Neil Stewart talked explicitly about his interest in sex involving minors while setting up what he thought was a meeting at the National Zoo with a man and his 9-year-old daughter, according to a prosecutor’s memo.

“What a bday gift that would be,” Stewart said, referring to the meeting happening on his 31st birthday in October 2015, if the 9-year-old girl “would like to play.”

In February 2017, U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson sentenced Stewart to 57 months in prison, or just under five years, after his conviction for possessing and distributing child pornography.

That punishment, far less than the 97 to 121 months prescribed by federal sentencing guidelines, is likely to come up Monday during Jackson’s Senate confirmation hearing on her appointment to the Supreme Court.

In another text, Stewart “provided advice” on how to begin convincing a child to have sexual intercourse, which then could be captured on video.

“The trick,” he wrote, “is starting with really small toys and gradually moving up until something is the same size. And vibration.”

Prosecutors quoted obscene and graphic language in Stewart’s texts for Jackson’s consideration in sentencing that can’t be repeated in a family publication.

In her presentence mitigation report on the case, Jackson wrote that “the conviction alone is devastating to Mr. Stewart,” later adding that his “risk of recidivism is exceedingly low.”

But on Jan. 5, 2020, the St. Mary’s County Sheriff’s Office in Maryland arrested Stewart, then 35, on four counts of possessing a controlled dangerous substance other than marijuana, as well as drug paraphernalia.

Stewart’s case is one of seven sex offender cases highlighted by Senate Judiciary Committee member Josh Hawley, R-Mo., in the days leading up to the confirmation hearing for Jackson, 51, President Joe Biden’s nominee to the Supreme Court.

Since June, Jackson, the mother of two daughters, has been a judge on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. From 2013 to 2021, she was a judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Stewart referred explicitly and crudely to sexual activity in his text exchanges about child porn and meeting “willing” children in late 2015. In one text, he said he liked children ages “5-11,” according to the court document from federal prosecutors.

Anticipating meeting the 9-year-old at the National Zoo on his birthday, he wrote: “That’s so hot, god I hope this is real.”

It wasn’t real.

Stewart didn’t know he actually was communicating with an undercover D.C. police detective.

The detective delayed the meeting past Stewart’s birthday. During that time, Stewart unknowingly relayed to the detective that he had large amounts of child porn on his computer, asserting he had “many flash drives” and “can bring it all” to the meeting.

The FBI was able to track Stewart’s email addresses and gained a search warrant, with which investigators found more than 600 images and videos of child pornography on various...

Read More HERE