Child-porn teacher gets 'huge break': One day in jail

A federal judge yesterday gave what he called "a huge break" to a former Main Line elementary-school teacher convicted of possessing kiddie porn.

U.S. District Judge Lawrence F. Stengel sentenced Salvatore Graci, 34, of Wallingford, to a day in prison and 10 years of supervised release and ordered him to register as a sex offender. Graci also is not to have contact with school-age children and will have his computer monitored by the probation office.

Stengel said that he had found specific circumstances that warranted leniency. The judge said that the government offered no evidence to suggest that Graci had ever acted in a predatory way toward minors. (Graci had taught fifth- and sixth-graders at elementary schools in Wynnewood, Merion Station and Drexel Hill between 1997 and 2003.)

Assistant U.S. Attorney Ewald Zittlau had asked for a sentence at the top of the advisory sentencing-guideline range of 51 to 63 months, arguing that Graci's conduct was "disturbing" and that it was important to "send a message" to others who would possess child porn.

Authorities said that Graci subscribed to and received access to three child-porn Web sites between January and May 2006. When federal agents searched his computer's hard drive in November 2007, they found nine video files containing about 600 sexually explict images of minors.

But defense attorney A. Charles Peruto Jr. said that Graci was neither a typical consumer of child porn nor a predator.

Instead, Peruto argued, Graci, a diminutive man, had a history of "striking out" with women and subscribed to the child-porn Web sites in order to find a "virgin" and to learn how to have sex.

The defense attorney also said that Graci didn't save any of the images, nor did he send them to others. Parents of children who were taught by Graci submitted letters attesting to his character.

A psychiatrist testified that Graci he had an "infantile view of sex" but was not a pedophile.

"It was not my intention to hurt anybody," Graci said, apologizing to the court, victims and his family. "I was just looking for a virgin. I did not know that what I was doing was criminally wrong, and if I did I would certainly not have done so."