Ex-Tampa police sergeant gets 111 years in prison for child porn

Yahoo

16-05-2025

A judge Friday sentenced a former Tampa police sergeant who once led the city's sex crimes squad to more than 100 years in prison for possessing child pornography.
Circuit Judge Robin Fuson sentenced Paul Leo Mumford to nearly 112 years, a term was at the bottom of state sentencing guidelines but is still effectively a life sentence for the 64-year-old former cop.
Dressed in a red jail suit, his salt-and-pepper hair disheveled, Mumford looked down at the table in front of him and shook his head after Fuson handed down the sentence. Mumford has been in jail since January, when a six-member jury found him guilty of having the materials.
It was the sort of ending to a criminal case that law enforcement officers, like Mumford once was, would celebrate as a success. But now it was Mumford, who worked 29 years with the Tampa Police Department including 18 months as the sergeant in charge of the sex crimes unit, who faced justice.
Mumford retired in 2015 but spent six more years as a reserve officer, and was still in that role when the child pornography investigation began in March 2021. It started after a chance encounter outside of Amalie Arena, according to court documents and testimony presented at trial.
James Bowie, another former Tampa officer, was heading to a Tampa Bay Lightning game there and saw Mumford directing traffic. Mumford had been Bowie's sergeant when they were assigned to the street crimes squad.
Bowie had since gone to work as an information security officer for Tampa General Hospital and had extensive training in computers. Mumford asked Bowie if he could help him recover some files stored on an external hard drive that had stopped working.
As Bowie was working on the drive at his home, he clicked on a photo and up popped an image of a young girl engaging in sexual activity with a group of men. He opened another file and it, too, showed a child engaging in sexual activity.
The next morning, Bowie got up, phoned an attorney and explained what had happened. The attorney arranged a meeting with Tampa police to turn over the hard drive and have Bowie give a statement.
A computer expert with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement was able to create an exact copy of the hard drive. A file held 100 sexualized images of children, pornographic cartoons showing children and pictures of children involved in sex acts with adults and other kids.
Detectives first confronted Mumford in February 2022 at his South Tampa home, arriving with a search warrant. When they mentioned the hard drive, he said it had stopped working and that he'd been 'hacked.' When told about the images, he said he knew nothing about them.
During the trial, Mumford's attorney, Chip Purcell, emphasized that the hard drive was so badly corrupted it took special tools for investigators to access the data. He also asserted that Mumford was not the only person who had access to the device.
Police also found 61 Microsoft Word documents whose contents, prosecutors said, included erotic and sexually explicit stories involving children. In one story, the story's narrator described himself as an older man with gray hair, a retired cop who worked as a reserve officer at hockey games, twice married, whose wife had three sons — all details that matched Mumford.
Mumford during trial took the witness stand and admitted he authored some, but not all, of the stories detectives found. He claimed they were a kind of therapy.
From age 10 to 16, he said, he endured 'extreme sexual abuse' from 'a pedophile ring throughout the state of Florida.'
'I believed it would help me get over the continued effects of that abuse,' he said on the stand.
Mumford denied knowing that the images were on the hard drive. He denied ever seeing them.
During Friday's sentencing hearing, Purcell, said Mumford continues to maintain his innocence. Purcell argued that prosecutors should have filed a single count of child pornography possession, which would carry a maximum penalty of 15 years. Purcell noted Mumford did not have a prior criminal record.
'He has a stellar record of service to this community as a police officer,' Purcell said.
Assistant State Attorney Jessica Couvertier, who prosecuted the case, noted that the charges Mumford faced were the same that his unit would have investigated. Couvertier told Fuson that the material on the hard drive contained images of of 'at least 162 identified exploited children' but that prosecutors filed 100 counts, which 'is uniform with how this jurisdiction operates.'
Couvertier said that a representative from the Florida Department of Corrections met with Mumford before submitting a pre-sentencing investigation report.
'He continued to deny or take any responsibility for the charges that he was convicted of,' Couvertier said. 'He continued to try to insinuate that it was somebody else in the home that had located these images and placed those images on their hard drive.'
Couvertier said the report found Mumford's actions to be 'a betrayal of the public trust' and warranted the maximum sentence of life in prison. Couvertier asked Fuson to hand down that life sentence.
Fuson did not preside over Mumford's trial but said he read the trial transcripts. He also signed the search warrants to seize electronic devices found in Mumford's home.
'This was not just an accidental click on Google where these child pornography pictures showed up,' Fuson said. 'One does not find child pornography accidentally, one has to seek it out.'
Fuson said there was no legal basis to depart from the lowest permissible prison sentence set by state guidelines.