GOP lawmaker Ray Holmberg, 80, served for more than 45 years in the North Dakota Senate before stepping down in 2022. The career-ender: his jaunts to Prague, where for years he sought out and indulged his taste for sex with minors. Indicted in October 2023, he was charged with traveling with intent to engage in illicit sexual activity and with receiving child sexual abuse material. Holmberg’s plea deal saw the CSAM charge dropped—and won a promise from prosecutors to “recommend a sentence at the low end of the guideline range.”
In the plea agreement, Holmberg acknowledged that from around June 2011 to November 2016, he “repeatedly traveled from Grand Forks, North Dakota to Prague, Czech Republic with a motivating purpose of engaging in commercial sex with adolescent-age individuals under the age of 18 years.”
Holmberg has been under numerous conditions of release, including travel restrictions, location monitoring and the surrender of his passport.
On Friday, the pretrial services officer filed a report saying Holmberg hadn’t met those conditions.
She wrote that he was verbally reprimanded and reminded of his pretrial release conditions after he left his residence once and also visited an adult novelty store, each without approval. He also “continuously” accessed the internet for unapproved reasons and did not allow updates and maintenance to the monitoring software on his cellular device, she said.
I don’t understand why someone who is refusing to comply with their pretrial release conditions is being given a sweetheart plea deal. I don’t understand why a CSAM possessor and admitted child rapist is illegally accessing the internet for unapproved reasons and it isn’t a problem for him in court. I don’t understand why this feels like a frustrating bureacratic problem that everyone involved is sympathetically helping Holmberg navigate.
Approved – Sully
KnockknockitstheFBI
Article URL : https://boingboing.net/2024/08/09/republican-lawmaker-pleads-guilty-to-europe-child-sex-tour-charge.html