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Former Paul Weiss Attorney Gets 5 Years On Child Pornography Charges

He'll see five years in prison and 10 years of supervised release.

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Jason Mark Sims, the Paul, Weiss staff attorney who pleaded guilty to distributing videos of child sex abuse, has been sentenced for his crimes. The charges against him were horrific — while at work he used his computer to engage in sexual explicit conversations about an undercover agent’s purported 10-year-old daughter. The chat transcript was an awful and damning piece of evidence against Sims:

Sims: Wow dude. Awesome. I’m terrified though.

Affiant: She has a real hot bod, 4’10” about 701bs. Good little slut. Lol

Sims: Jesus. Have you done this kind ofthing before? Is she really game?

Affiant: We have talked about bringing in another guy for a while. She loves it.

Sims: Nice. I’m so fucking hard thinking about that right now.

On Friday, Sims was sentenced to five years in prison and 10 years of supervised release. As reported by Law.com, his punishment also includes a writing assignment, designed to help deter others:

Senior U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III in Alexandria, Virginia, handed down the sentence against Sims, 36, who was charged by federal prosecutors in August. As part of Sims’ sentence, Ellis has ordered him to write an article for publication about his crime in an “effort to achieve general deterrence,” according to a statement by the U.S. attorney’s office in Alexandria.

Five years is the mandatory minimum sentence for the crime Sims pleaded to. His lawyers, Judith Wheat and Donna Murphy, had requested the minimum sentence citing Sims’s lack of a previous criminal record, his pro bono work, and the recommendations of a certified sex offender treatment therapist and a forensic psychiatrist who characterize him as a low-risk repeat offender. In court documents, Wheat and Murphy also noted Sims’s history as a victim of childhood abuse and his remorse over his actions:

“While incarcerated he has read [victim] statements and with visible emotion he has struggled to make sense of the reasons he chose to act as he did,” wrote Wheat and Murphy. “This has not been an easy process for Mr. Sims and the effect of his choices on everyone—his wife, his son, the children in the videos—weighs heavily on him.”

Prosecutors in the case had sought the maximum sentence of between 97 to 121 months in prison.

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headshotKathryn Rubino is an editor at Above the Law. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

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