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22 year old “Cheer,” Jerry Harris has been sentenced to 12 years in prison for child pornography.

Harris, 22, of Naperville, Illinois, pleaded guilty earlier this year to receiving child pornography and traveling with the intent to engage in illegal sexual conduct.

He was arrested in September 2020 on a charge of child pornography production. Prosecutors claimed at the time that he asked two 14-year-old brothers for videos and images.

Federal prosecutors said in a complaint that Harris admitted to repeatedly asking a minor teen for pornographic videos and images between December 2018 and March 2020.

Harris admitted to FBI agents that he asked a teenage boy to send him lewd photographs of himself and that he asked a child to send him lewd photographs of himself and to requesting child pornography on Snapchat from at least 10 to 15 others he knew to be minors, according to the indictment.

The former cheerleader was sentenced to life in prison for coercing teenage boys to send him obscene photos and videos of themselves, as well as soliciting sex from minors at cheerleading competitions.

The sentence will also be followed by eight years of court-supervised release, according to US District Judge Manish Shah.

Shah told Harris to consider the sentence an “expression of the seriousness of your crimes, tempered with some hope that all is not lost for you or for your victims, and that in the future some healing can occur.”

 

A prosecutor had asked for a sentence of 15 years followed by 10 years of supervised release while attorneys for Harris sought a sentence of six years and eight years of supervised release.

Before learning his sentence, Harris apologized to his victims, saying;

“I am deeply sorry for all the trauma my abuse has caused you. I pray deep down that your suffering comes to an end.

“I’m not an evil person. I’m still learning who I am and what my purpose is.”