Orlando, FL – A former South Daytona private school teacher convicted of having sex with children on camera and then sharing the videos online gets his appeal turned down in federal court.
The 11th Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals upheld Matthew Graziotti’s 210 year prison sentence on Friday.
Graziotti – a former youth pastor who was also a 5th grade teacher and summer camp director at Warner Christian Academy at the time of his arrest – was originally sentenced in January after changing his initial “not guilty” plea in court last October.
The 44-year-old argued that his sentence was unreasonable because there’s no way he could live long enough to serve it, but the judges ruled that fact by itself doesn’t make the sentence unreasonable.
Graziotti was initially arrested in July 2014 after agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided his Edgewater home.
Federal prosecutors say that raid was done after Graziotti unknowingly gave 141 child porn images and 6 videos depicting the sexual abuse of children to an undercover FBI agent.
The FBI reports that agents found thousands of child porn images and videos on a computer found in Graziotti’s home during the raid.
According to the FBI, some of those images and videos featured 29 children that Graziotti knew, all of whom were under the age of 12 at the time.
Investigators believe Graziotti produced these images from 2010 through 2014 and shared them with other pedophiles through an online file-sharing program.
Graziotti entered guilty pleas to 7 counts of production of child porn, 1 count of distribution of child porn and 1 count of possession of child porn involving children under the age of 12.
Matthew Graziotti (mugshot courtesy Seminole County Jail)
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