A former Troup County commissioner once called a prolific collector of child pornography will have a chance to spend the rest of his 1,000-year prison sentence on parole.
The State Board of Pardons and Paroles released Peter Mallory on parole May 27, three weeks after an appeals court found the sentence for Mallory’s 2012 conviction was appropriate. District Attorney Herb Cranford said he opposed the decision “but was powerless to stop it.”
Cranford on Tuesday released a statement explaining his opposition after he said several members of the Troup County community expressed concern over Mallory’s release.
Mallory, 72, a former owner of LaGrange television station WCAG-TV, was convicted of 60 counts of sexual exploitation of children, three counts of invasion of privacy and one count of tampering with evidence in December 2012 after a three-week trial.
He was charged as a result of a LaGrange Police Department investigation initiated in February 2011. According to prosecutors, police were alerted to more than 600 suspected child porn files linked to a computer in LaGrange, which led them to the television station Mallory operated.
More than 26,000 files of child pornography were seized.
“The evidence demonstrated that Mallory knowingly and intentionally sought out, gathered, downloaded and saved these images and videos of children being raped, tortured and sexually exploited,” Cranford said in a prior news release.
The invasion of privacy counts stemmed from a hidden camera Mallory installed in his office that he used to secretly record young women, Cranford said.
At sentencing a few months after the trial, Coweta Judicial Circuit Superior Court Judge Dennis Blackmon called Mallory “probably the most prolific collector of child pornography in the entire world.”
His conviction and sentence was affirmed by the Court of Appeals on May 7.
Cranford advocated against Mallory’s release in a December letter to the parole board. Mallory was first eligible for parole in December 2019, seven years after his conviction. According to a parole board spokesman, Mallory’s eligibility was determined by Georgia’s sentencing laws for consecutive sentences, despite the length of his sentence.
The board reconsidered the case and set a new parole month of December 2022.
Cranford said he opposed parole “now or any time in the future” and said the Troup County community would be offended if Mallory was released after serving just seven years of his 1,000-year sentence.
“The evidence shows that Mallory is sexually deviant and commits these crimes by compulsion as much as by choice,” he said in the letter. “In the current digital age, no amount of supervision can stop a compulsive sexual deviant like Mallory from seeking out the most heinous images and videos of small children being sexually abused.”
Two victims involved in the case also opposed parole, Cranford said. At a minimum, they asked that Mallory be banned from Troup County and from contacting them if he was released.
“Mallory’s crimes did not allow for the state to seek or the trial court to impose a sentence without parole eligibility, and parole is a power exercised exclusively by the State Board of Pardons and Paroles,” Cranford said Tuesday in the statement.
In an April response to Cranford, the parole board said earlier release was possible due to “performance incentive credits.” Board spokesman Steve Hayes said Mallory actually served five months in prison beyond the date he was eligible for release by law and the board followed its guidelines system to determine his parole.
“The clemency recommendation was for a parole release at eligibility,” Hayes said in an email to AJC.com. “Mallory was released five months later. His parole release is not COVID-19 related.”
For the remainder of his sentence, Mallory will be required to register as a sex offender and will be subject to having his parole revoked if he violates the law or the conditions of his release. He is banished from Troup County, is on electronic monitoring and cannot contact any victims.
“The board is confident he will be closely monitored by the Georgia Department of Community Supervision,” he said.
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