Nicholas Pinto, Beaten Into Coma, Shows What Life Is Like for a Child Pornographer Behind Bars

8-31-2010 Pennsylvania:

In 2008, Nicolas Pinto was arrested on federal charges of taking explicit photos and videos of children. He subsequently pleaded guilty, and was supposed to be sentenced in October. But due to the glacial wheels of justice, he's spent the last two years in jail...

And while everyone knows that child porn offenders aren't treated well by fellow inmates, his case shows exactly how brutal life behind bars can be.

He was incarcerated at the Lackawanna County Prison in Scranton, Pennsylvania. From the beginning, he began keeping a diary on his treatment. Fellow inmates and a prison priest back up his tales of vicious abuse.

In his diary, Pinto wrote that guards would make him stand naked in his cell for days on end and chant "kill yourself" over the prison PA system. A fellow inmate says guards would stomp on Pinto's bare toes, parade him naked around common areas, smack him in the head and throw his food in the garbage. The inmate also said that Pinto would be released from his cell with other inmates, then guards would announce over the PA system, "Go get 'em, boys."

Pinto's diary says he was routinely raped by another inmate he called "the silverback."

"First night is bleeding but no penetration," he wrote. "The next night is full-on jailhouse Bubba."

He reported the rapes to guards, but no one would investigate, says Father William Pickard, the prison chaplain. That led to further rapes, after which the guards refused Pinto medical treatment.

Beatings reveal vulnerability of O.C. jails' child-sex suspects

11-15-2006 California:

Of the state's five largest systems, it alone fails to automatically segregate such inmates.

Orange County jails are the only ones among the state's five largest jail systems that do not automatically provide protective custody to inmates accused of sex crimes involving children, leaving them vulnerable to attacks like the one last month in which a prisoner was beaten to death.

A second inmate, awaiting trial on charges of child molestation, was severely beaten in June and has just recently been released -- brain-damaged, according to his family -- after five months in a hospital.

The Sheriff's Department's decision to pull back protection for child molestation and child pornography possession suspects -- perhaps those most despised by other prisoners -- occurred sometime in the last three years, according to two law enforcement sources with knowledge of the situation.

Child porn defendant claims loss of memory

10-7-2006 Indiana:
.The federal prosecution of a Middletown man accused of taking lewd photographs of a young boy has been delayed by the defendant's claims that a beating he received at the hands of a fellow Henry County jail inmate has robbed him of his memory.

Dick L. Noel -- arrested when state police raided his home, at 9379 N. Henry County Road 800-W, in August 2005 -- was recently transferred to a federal prison system medical facility in Lexington, Ky., for a "mental, medical and neurological examination" to determine whether he is competent to stand trial on child pornography charges.

Public defenders for the 53-year-old Noel had in late August asked U.S. District Court Judge John Tinder to have their client examined "to determine whether he is suffering from a mental disease or defect rendering him mentally incompetent to the extent he is unable to understand the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him or to assist properly in his defense."

The attorneys said that Noel -- who originally faced state charges in Henry Superior Court 1 that were dismissed when the U.S. district attorney's office filed similar federal charges last November -- was "violently assaulted by another inmate" in the Henry County jail soon after his arrest "and sustained serious neurological and physical injuries." ..more.. : by DOUGLAS WALKER