Wade Sanders

Wade Sanders, is a United States Navy veteran and attorney from in San Diego, California. As an attorney, he specialized in the legal practice of corporate governance and ethics, as well as employee owned companies and lobbying for major corporations. In December 2008 he pled guilty to possession of child pornography. He is the son of a career U.S. Navy officer who was injured while serving as Gunner's Mate aboard the USS Pensacola, and Mary Houston, an artist.

Career

Education

Sanders received his Bachelor of Arts from California State University, Long Beach, his Juris Doctor from the University of San Diego School of Law, and is a graduate of the Naval War College. He also attended the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Naval career

A combat veteran of the Vietnam War, where he served as Swift Boat skipper, PCF-98 and retired reserve Navy Captain, Sanders served nearly thirty years of active and reserve Naval service and received the Bronze Star, the Purple Heart, and in 1992 was awarded the Silver Star

Sanders is the author of many published articles and opinion pieces in major newspapers and the Navy Institute Proceeding, and served as a columnist for Military.com and a television commentator on national security matters and the war in Iraq for NBC and Fox.

He sat on the board of the non-profit organization Vietnam Veterans of San Diego.

Governmental career

A former Deputy Assistant United States Secretary of the Navy during the Clinton Administration, he contributed significantly to the Post Cold War restructuring and modernization of the Armed Forces of the United States and worked with the United States Secretary of Defense to achieve full integration of the Reserve and Guard Components of the U.S. Military.

He was also a member of the San Diego Police Department Senior Oversight Committee and briefly ran for the United States Congress as a Democrat in 2000 before dropping out of the race, citing a lack of funding.

During the 2004 presidential campaign, Sanders was a prominent spokesman for presidential campaign of Democrat John Kerry. Sanders introduced Kerry at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, made an appearance in the documentary Going Upriver - The Long War of John Kerry (2004), and made public rebuttals to criticisms of Kerry's war record made by the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

Personal

On December 22, 2008, Sanders pleaded guilty to one felony charge of possession of images of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct, before the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California in San Diego. The pleas came six months after federal agents had served a search warrant and seized several computers at his San Diego home. They contained eight videos, one as along as 45 minutes, of child pornography. The charge carries a maximum sentence of 10 years imprisonment, with fines up to $250,000 and a requirement to register as a sex offender. As part of his plea, Sanders admitted possessing more than 600 images of child pornography on his computer, including a 21-minute video that depicted girls engaging in sex acts with an adult man (with each video frame counting as an image), the maximum number of images counted under federal sentencing guidelines. He was caught under a 2½-year-old Department of Justice investigation called Project Safe Childhood.

"I got caught in the net," Sanders said, "I'm not the kind of person they were after." Sanders said he had downloaded the files as part of his research for an article on sexual exploitation of children in foreign countries. He said his work for the Clinton administration had included aiding victims of child sex abuse in the former Yugoslavia. "I have no sexual attraction to children whatsoever," Sanders said. "There was no evil intent." Sanders also said he didn't realize federal child pornography laws barred downloading or viewing the material even by researchers. He said that is why he decided to plead guilty. "I thought since my motives were pure and innocent, that would make a difference," he said, but agreed he was technically guilty of the crime.

On May 4, 2009, Sanders was sentenced to 37 months in prison. At his sentencing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Alessandra Serano said an analysis of the seized computers showed that Sanders viewed all kinds of pornography frequently, and that the child pornography was downloaded to his computer as early as 2003. There was no evidence to show he was engaged in a long-term research project, which undercut Sanders' central claim. The sentence from U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Whelan was far less than the maximum term of 10 years, and less than the 63 months federal prosecutors were seeking. The U.S. Attorney's office recommended that Sanders be sent to a federal facility that treats sex offenders whose crimes did not include contact with victims.

At his sentencing, Sanders took responsibility for his actions, but also insisted he downloaded child pornography videos as part of a research project. "This is the hardest moment of my life,” Sanders told the judge. He said his years serving during the Vietnam War were a "a walk in the park" compared to this. He said he was not a pedophile, which several mental health experts who examined him had concluded was true. "I know what I was doing, and I know why I was doing it," Sanders said, emphasizing that his interest was scholarly and not for arousal.

External links

1. Wade Sanders Archives at Military.com [1]
2. Wade Sanders on KPBS TV San Diego "Full Focus" (mostly)[2]
3. Ex-Navy Official Wade Sanders Pleads Guilty in Child Porn Case at Los Angeles Times, December 22, 2008 [3]