The Mountain Eagle
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Charles Hall convicted in child porn, stalking caseFree Access


A federal jury has found a former Letcher County teacher guilty of child pornography and cyber stalking related to months of sexual contact with a 14-year-old girl.
Charles Evans Hall Jr. will be formally sentenced in U.S. District Court in February. He faces 25 to 40 years in prison, law enforcement officials said.
Jurors in U.S. District Court in London took just a little over an hour to return the guilty verdict after a three-day trial.
Hall was indicted by a federal grand jury a year ago on the child pornography charge, but a second federal grand jury issued a superseding indictment in April charging him with producing child pornography and using Instagram, Facebook and other means to harass and intimidate the victim in the case. Hall was already facing state charges of unlawful use of an electronic device to engage in sexual or prohibited activities, tampering with a witness, tampering with physical evidence, third-degree rape, first-degree sexual abuse, third-degree sodomy, possession or viewing of matter portraying a sexual performance by a minor, use of a minor in a sexual performance, first-degree sexual abuse and third-degree sodomy.
Federal authorities obtained phone records from Hall and the victim as well as subscriber information and data from Instagram and Snapchat accounts belonging to them. According to court documents, the data included at least one “sanitized” child pornography image.
Prosecutors alleged that while Hall was a prisoner in the Letcher County Jail, he enlisted a fellow inmate, John Cioc, to pass messages to the victim in attempt to influence her testimony. Prosecutors included recorded phone calls between Cioc and his wife, Nikki, as well as Facebook Messenger records between Nikki Cioc and the victim. Evidence also included a public Facebook post from Hall’s mother, who prosecutors said Hall also convinced to send a message to the victim.
Hall was a teacher at Letcher County Alternative School and a former assistant football coach at Letcher County Central High School when he was arrested in early December 2018. He had been a teacher at Letcher Middle School when he was suspended the previous spring pending an investigation, but he was reinstated as a teacher at the alternative school after a Kentucky State Police Post 13 investigation of that incident lapsed. Both police and the school district said at the time that the allegations were unsubstantiated.
The federal indictment accused Hall of committing the sex acts during a period from January 2018 to November 20, 2018, when he “did employ, use, persuade, induce, entice, and coerce a minor to engage in sexually explicit conduct for the purpose of producing a visual depiction of such conduct,” knowing that it would then be sent though interstate and foreign commerce.
The indictment said Hall communicated with the girl from November 2018 through February 2020 with intent to “injure, harass, and intimidate” her, and to “engage in a course of conduct that caused, attempted to cause, and would be reasonably expected to cause, substantial emotional distress to Victim 1.”
Hall is scheduled to be sentenced at 11 a.m. February 22, 2022. He will remain in jail pending his sentencing.

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