Robert Stanton, Houston Chronicle –
A Houston man faces up to 160 years in prison if he is convicted of 16 counts of possession of child pornography, a Harris County prosecutor said.
Charles Leonard Woods, 66, is in the Harris County jail without bail on the child porn possession charges – all third-degree felonies, court records show. He also faces a first-degree felony charge of continued sexual abuse of a child.
Woods allegedly took a 13-year-old girl to a motel on the Gulf Freeway in 2008 to make sexual videos and photographs, officials said. She spoke out about the abuse in 2011. Woods had been free on $100,000 bail after he was arrested in February of this year on the continuous sexual abuse of a child charge, records show.
Houston police arrested Woods again on Friday, and seized a laptop computer belonging to him that contained photos and videos of minors engaged in sexual activity, according to court records.
The case stands out because prosecutors opted to file the child porn charges separately, as opposed to filing one count for the multiple alleged offenses.
Harris County prosecutors decided to file individual charges of possession of child pornography against Woods in order to give the judge more leeway should the defendant be convicted, said John Wakefield, an assistant district attorney in the DA’s child exploitation section.
“The charges have the potential to be stackable or run consecutively,” Wakefield said. “We want to give the judge the option to and ability to stack if that’s what the judge believes.”
Woods’ case will be heard before Judge David Mendoza of the 178th District Court in Harris County.
