John Morrison, a former film programmer at Real Art Ways in Hartford, was sentenced to three years in prison by a San Francisco judge on Nov. 13, after having pleaded guilty in June to possessing more than 600 pieces of child pornography, some of which depicted “sadistic conduct and the sexual exploitation of toddlers,” according to federal court records.
Morrison and the United States District Court in the Northern District of California came to a plea agreement on Nov. 6. After his prison time, he will be on supervised probation for five years.
Morrison, 73, has been free on $100,000 bond while awaiting sentencing. He was ordered to self-surrender on Jan. 13, 2020. Until that day, he will no longer be on mandatory location monitoring and he will be allowed to travel to Massachusetts to visit his sister, who has Alzheimer’s. Last year, his request to visit his sister was denied on the grounds of the logistical burden of two states monitoring his whereabouts.
Morrison was arrested on March 13, 2017. According to a sentencing memo prepared by U.S. attorneys David L. Anderson and Ross Weingarten, Skype reported a child-pornography transaction to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the ensuing investigation led to Morrison.
At the time of his arrest, Morrison “admitted that he found individuals on Craigslist who would send him child pornography, and that he had been viewing it for five years,” the memo states.
Morrison, who worked remotely from San Francisco, programmed films for the Hartford art space from 1996, when its cinema opened, until June 2019, the same month he pleaded guilty to the child porn charge. He was dismissed from his other job, as a child educator at California Film Institute, at the time of his arrest in 2017. Morrison also previously worked as a consultant for the Mill Valley Film Festival Children’s Fest and Kidflix Global. Before moving to California, he was a movie theater owner and a city councilman in Northampton, Mass.
formerly Mad Cornish Projectionist.