Nora Springs man sentenced to 40 years on child porn charges

By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com

A Nora Springs man who pleaded guilty to two charges of child pornography in federal court has been sentenced to 40 years in federal prison.

A U.S. District Court judge in Cedar Rapids issued the sentence Monday for Aaron Leroy Olson, age 36, sentencing him to 240 years in prison on each of two counts.

Judge C.J. Williams ordered Olson to serve the sentences consecutively (one after the other) for a total of 480 months in prison, rather than concurrently (at the same time) as is often done. There is no early parole in the federal system.

Williams also ordered Olson to participate in a substance abuse treatment program at the prison and a sex offender management program. He ordered Olson to serve five years supervised released after his prison term ends.

Olson pleaded guilty last December to two charges of possession of child pornography involving a young child. As part of the plea, three charges of sexual exploitation of children and an additional child pornography charge were dismissed.

Part of the plea included the recommendation for a total of 40 years in prison. Using federal sentencing guidelines the total prison sentence for the two charges could have been for as much as 67½ years.

Olson was initially charged in November 2018 in Floyd County with three counts of second-degree sexual abuse for three separate incidents where he allegedly showed pornography on a computer to a 5-year-old girl and/or made the girl touch his genitals.

In July 2019 the charges were dismissed in Floyd County District Court because Olson was in federal custody facing charges of child pornography. The county charges were dismissed without prejudice, meaning the state could refile them if it chose to.

Olson was initially charged in federal court in May 2019 with two counts of sexual exploitation of children, to allegedly create child pornography.

He was accused in the federal indictment of one count of using a minor girl and one count of using a minor boy “to engage in sexually explicit conduct for the purpose of producing visual depictions of such conduct.”
The charges he was convicted of say the victims were prepubescent or under the age of 12.

The acts occurred between October 2017 and October 2018, according to the indictment.

The visual depictions were produced using materials that had previously been shipped and transported in interstate and foreign commerce, including a digital camera, two SD cards and a hard drive from a laptop computer that were all made outside of Iowa.

Because the devices used to create the sexual depictions were shipped across state lines, federal charges could be filed.