Anthony Osche

A Butler man, who already is on the state’s Megan’s Law list, unsuccessfully tried to convince a jury that no one could prove it was him who downloaded 1,400 child pornography videos.

But the jury disagreed.

After deliberating a little more than an hour, a six-man, six-woman jury Tuesday convicted Anthony Osche, 25, of 36 felony charges, including possession and dissemination of child pornography and criminal use of a communication facility.

Deputy Attorney General Anthony Marmo said he will seek a mandatory 25- to 50-year prison term when Osche is sentenced in April by Butler County Judge Timothy McCune, who presided over the two-day trial.

“The egregiousness of the crime merits that sentence ... This is his second strike and some of the pornography contains toddlers,” Marmo said after the verdict.

Osche’s attorney, Terri Schultz, said with that length of a mandatory sentence, her client had no choice but to go to trial.

“I don’t think the punishment fits the crime,” said Schultz, who throughout the trial stressed that the case did not involve live children. “This is about a computer and pictures. That is what we are dealing with here.”

Marmo, in his closing argument, responded that, “these are real kids ... real families. These are images of toddlers being sexually abused.”

A forensic expert had testified that he sent the images from this case to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and that organization identified some children that it positively knew their names and ages.

Osche never testified.

Duane Tayback, an agent with the Attorney General’s Child Predator Unit, told the jury that the investigation began in 2013 when he posed undercover on a peer-to-peer Internet file sharing website and obtained five videos containing child pornography from a user.

The Internet service provider told the investigator which home the files originated from: 553 Elm St., Butler.

There, in Osche’s upstairs bedroom, investigators found a laptop computer under the bed, an external hard drive on the desk and multiple phones and media storage cards containing videos of pornography involving children as young as 3 years old. Most of the files contained the letters “PTHC” in the title, which an expert testified is an abbreviation for “pre-teen hard core.”

Shultz argued to the jury that multiple other people lived in the same home at the time, including the defendant’s father, stepmother, stepsister and grandparents. A laptop, she argued, is movable and no investigator could directly prove it was Osche who downloaded the illicit material or even that it was his computer or bedroom.

“They can’t say who was seated behind that keyboard,” Shultz said during her closing argument.

But Marmo countered that Osche himself on the day of the home search told investigators in a videotaped interview that he’d collected so much child pornography that he couldn’t even quantify it.

The jury was not shown the videotape of the interview. But Tayback testified that Osche told him that he began collecting the child pornography because he was stressed about his girlfriend breaking up with him.

According to court records, Osche had a similar conviction in Dauphin County in 2009. In that case, Osche was sentenced to 2 years’ probation. Because of the nature of the crime, he already is on the state’s Megan’s Law website.

Before being sentenced in the new conviction, an expert with the state’s Sexual Offender Assessment Board will evaluate Osche and make a recommendation about whether he also should carry the sexually violent predator label.

Schultz, who argued outside the jury’s hearing that her client’s confession was not voluntary, said she plans to appeal.