Kevin Etherington
(PCSD file photo)
By Patti Weaver
STILLWATER — A Payne County jury composed of six men and six women deliberated for an hour before convicting former First Assistant District Attorney Kevin Etherington of possessing child pornography on July 23, 2022, when he was living in a Stillwater apartment.
Jurors recommended that the 56-year-old ex-prosecutor be given a 15-year prison term plus a $10,000 fine for having over 100 videos or images of child sexual abuse material and a five-year prison term plus a $10,000 fine for possessing on his Google drive two lewd videos of children, one of whom was naked and bound.
At the close of his four-day trial, Etherington, who had been free on bond for almost three years, was ordered jailed pending his sentencing on May 8.
Pottawatomie County District Judge John Canavan Jr., who had been appointed to preside at his trial after Payne County judges recused, ordered a pre-sentencing investigation of Etherington following his March 5 conviction.
The case against Etherington was investigated by the Tulsa division of the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation (OSBI) and prosecuted by Tulsa County Assistant District Attorney Amy Dickens, whose office was specially assigned by the Oklahoma Attorney General.
Etherington, who prosecuted homicides in Payne and Logan Counties, had been employed for eight years by District Attorney Laura Austin Thomas. She fired him on Nov. 28, 2022, after he was arrested by OSBI Lt. Nicholas Rizzi, a member of the Oklahoma Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force.
An investigation had begun on July 26, 2022, when Goggle submitted a cyber tip to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children regarding 57 image files that depicted suspected child sexual abuse material. “The images were being stored within the Google Drive infrastructure,” an OSBI affidavit said.
“The suspect listed in the cyber tip was Kevin Etherington. The report indicated that AT&T U-verse was the Internet Service Provider, and the user was located in or around Stillwater, Oklahoma,” according to the OSBI affidavit. A search warrant was sent to Google for additional content from a Google account, the affidavit said.
“A review of that data revealed that the subscriber was Kevin Etherington,” the affidavit said. The agent “located 153 video and picture files that contained child sexual abuse material,” the affidavit said.
Defense attorney Mike Johnson of Oklahoma City maintained throughout the trial that 93 people had access to the IP address and that the pornography was uploaded by a hacker in 58 minutes.
In his testimony, the OSBI agent told jurors that the pornography included images of a child bound with hands behind the back, another small child being penetrated, and a child crying in a video. The judge cleared the courtroom of everyone except the jurors and lawyers when the child pornography was shown.
Etherington did not testify at his trial, but the jury heard a recorded interview with the OSBI agent in which he proclaimed his innocence.
“I had no child pornography on it. Why would I do that? I don’t download child porn. I wouldn’t do that,” to which the OSBI agent said, “It’s on your drive. You tell me nobody else has access to your computer.
“Did you ever take pictures of (clothed) underage girls?” the OSBI agent asked Etherington, who replied, “It’s not child porn. That’s a fetish, bro,” on the recorded interview.
The OSBI agent insisted to Etherington, “Each one of those videos, we can tell when it was accessed. It’s gotta be you unless somebody else has access to your shit and you said no one has.
“You’ve done it and we’ve got you. I know you don’t prosecute child porn cases. I’m going to take you to the county jail. We’ll have the sheriff transport you someplace else,” the OSBI agent concluded.
During the trial, an ex-girlfriend of Etherington, who had dated him for about five years, identified her daughter in photos including one at a swimming pool. On cross-examination, she testified that she never saw Etherington do anything inappropriate with her daughter.
The defense called only one witness, Alvy Matlock, who was identified as a visual forensic expert. He testified that on July 23, 2022, a mass cluster of files were put on Etherington’s Google drive account: “The data appeared to be originated from a social media account. The volume of data indicated a cloud-to- cloud transfer.”
When the defense witness was asked, “Did Mr. Etherington ever have child pornography on any of his devices in Oklahoma?” he replied “no, sir.”
In his closing argument to the jury, the defense attorney argued, “This was file-to-file sharing in 58 minutes…some server on a data mining center in Dallas, a cloud-to-cloud transfer. Those people in Dallas are the source of all this,” not Etherington.
“He’s a prosecutor. He knows what these allegations mean. It’s destroyed him. What you’ve heard is speculation, no evidence. It’s time to send this man home.”
But the special prosecutor argued that Etherington “knew exactly what he was in possession of, well over 100 images. He has an interest in children. This is not something that ended up on his (Google) drive that he had no idea how it got there.
“You have heard absolutely no testimony that 93 other people were accessing his account. Connect the dots. Etherington Law Firm belongs to this defendant. It’s connected to the IP address. This material belongs to Kevin Etherington.
“Every single child was a victim. That material the defendant had included (images of) raping children, ages 6 and 7,” she said in asking for a guilty verdict that the jury returned an hour later.
