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In some ways, it’s appropriate that Richard Howard Craft, a disgraced former Greeley pastor, was sentenced to federal prison on April Fools’ Day.
Then again, “fool” is too mild a term for Craft given what he’s admitted to doing. And frankly, “schmuck” doesn’t really cut it, either, although it’ll do in a fix.
You see, Craft has pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography, a crime for which he’ll spend the next decade behind bars. And that’s not all.
Craft’s no-longer-available LinkedIn profile reportedly highlighted his work as an interim pastor for the Family of Christ Presbyterian Church in Greeley, a “peace-and-justice oriented” institution with 65 members, all of whom are presumably creeped out at this point.
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The profile also stated that he’d been educated at the Claremont School of Theology in Los Angeles, had served as a pastor for forty years and was writing two books.
It’s disturbing to consider the topics of those tomes given his dirty secrets. In late December 2009, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, an undercover FBI officer in Philadelphia discovered that Craft was sharing numerous child-porn files from his computer in Thornton. He’d apparently obtained them between July 2007 and January 2008.
That old line about the wheels of justice grinding slowly was certainly true in his case. He was finally indicted by a federal grand jury in Denver on August 20 of last year, pleading guilty to child pornography the following November. On Monday, U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson formally sentenced him to a decade in jail, five years of supervised release afterward, and a requirement to register as a sex offender.
U.S. Attorney John Walsh offered the following statement after the sentencing: “As the defendant told Judge Jackson during his sentencing hearing, sexual predators view children as objects for gratification, not human beings to nurture. The lengthy prison sentence is a result of the fact of the defendant’s compulsive viewing of child pornography.”
That paints a picture — and so does Craft’s collar-free mug shot, which illustrates how far away from that peace-and-justice ministry he’s managed to fall. Here it is.
More from our Schmuck of the Week archive: “Todd Griffin more than earns his schmucky nickname: The Funeral Bandit.”