A North Texas doctoral student whose family is connected to China’s Communist Party was sentenced Thursday to eight years in federal prison for accessing thousands of child pornography images and videos including some depicting the sexual assault of infants and toddlers, court records said.
Shanlin Jin, 24, who lived in Allen, had more than 47,000 images and videos on his computer, police have said.
U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant in Sherman also ordered Jin to pay restitution to seven victims who requested it.
Jin, a Chinese national, pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography in December [2022] and faced up to a decade in prison under the sentencing guidelines. He will probably be deported after he serves his sentence, court records show.
(…) Born in Beijing, Jin was scheduled to obtain a bachelor’s degree from the “Special Class for the Gifted Young at the University of Science and Technology of China” just before his 19th birthday, according to court records.
He moved to the U.S. in 2016 to pursue academic studies, first obtaining a master’s degree in economics from Temple University in Philadelphia. He then moved to North Texas to begin a PhD program in economics at Southern Methodist University, according to court records.
The criminal investigation began at the end of 2020 when undercover officers downloaded child pornography from a user they eventually identified as Jin, records show.
The Collin County Sheriff’s Office searched the Allen home he was renting in January 2021. Afterward, an investigator questioned him in a police vehicle outside the house and he admitted viewing child pornography images, authorities said.
When Jin’s attorneys tried to have his statements to police suppressed, prosecutors responded that he wasn’t in custody at the time and called him a “highly intelligent, educated man” who was fluent in English and understood what was happening. The judge did not throw out his statements.
An FBI agent said during a detention hearing in the case that Jin told officers he knew that child pornography was “very bad stuff.” (Read more: Dallas Morning News. 7/14/2022) (Archive)