A Sacramento, California pilot who traveled to the Philippines to have sex with underage girls was sentenced on January 23, 2018 to life in prison.
The man had also worked with a woman in the Philippines to produce child pornography.
The girls were said to be as young as seven years old.
The sentencing of Michael Carey Clemans, 57, comes four months after a federal jury in Sacramento found him guilty of a variety of charges.
The charges include traveling overseas to engage in illicit sexual conduct and buying children.
Clemans pleaded guilty to separate counts of producing child pornography and receiving child pornography at the start of the trial.
During the sentencing hearing this week, U.S. District Judge John Mendez said he was sickened by the crimes.
According to court documents, Clemans worked with overseas associates to locate vulnerable children, directing them to seek out orphans or the victims of typhoons.
Details about Clemans’ crimes included “salacious” chats he exchanged with a Filipino woman to try to “arrange sex with underage girls.”
“I want to be able to get my photos and arrange sex with the underage girls…I do not want you or me to get into trouble…so we have to be very very careful,” he wrote in a message.
Clemans paid the woman he was chatting in the Philippines $6,000 to take photos of the nude girls who he would sexually assault when he was in the Philippines.
More than 27,000 pornographic images of children were found on his computer at his parent’s house.
In another message he wrote: “that is the reason I mentioned orphanages or runaways…or abandoned girls from the typhoons…I am looking for girls that are homeless that will not argue and will have no obligation but to have sex”
U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott said Clemans was attempting to produce child pornography by buying Filipino children.
“He sent money to that person to procure the children, requested in graphic detail the types of pornographic images he wanted of those children, those images were made and sent to him, he selected which children he wanted to travel to the Philippines to have sex with,” Scott said.