Palm Coast, FL – A sex offender whose last registered address was in Palm Coast will spend time in federal prison for failing to register once he moved.
United States District Judge Marcia Morales Howard sentenced Stephen Paul Cotton to 23 months behind bars, according to a press release sent Tuesday by the United States Department of Justice.
DOJ officials say Cotton left Florida sometime after July 2, 2012 and traveled to Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia without reporting his whereabouts to local authorities.
Cotton was convicted in January 1999 of committing a lewd and lascivious act on a child in Manatee County and had been registering as a sex offender as required from 2004 to 2012.
Cotton was arrested in the Georgia city of Suwanee last April and has been in custody ever since.
The 43-year-old man was also ordered to register as a sex offender and to serve a 5-year term of supervised release.
Stephen Paul Cotton (mugshot courtesy Florida Department of Law Enforcement)
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