PORT ANGELES — A Sequim lawyer was charged Tuesday in Clallam County Superior Court with possessing child pornography.
Fred Warren Inman, 61, will be arraigned at 9 a.m. Oct. 8 on single charges of first- and second-degree possession of depictions of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct.
Inman, represented Tuesday by John Hayden of Port Angeles, continued to be released on his personal recognizance, a judgment made following his first court appearance Friday after his arrest.
The prosecuting attorney’s office had sought $10,000 bail.
Both charges are Class B felonies with maximum sentences of 10 years.
In the first-degree pornography charge, each image is a separate offense, according to Washington Criminal Jury Instructions, govt.westlaw.com. For second-degree possession, each incident of possession of one or more images is a separate offense.
The images on Inman’s cellphone of mostly prepubescent girls were contained in CyberTip reports provided to the Sequim Police Department by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, according to a probable cause statement written by Sequim Police Office Kindryn Leiter.
The images were stored on the Verizon cloud by Synchronoss, a cloud-based storage provider for Verizon, and were found on Inman’s Samsung Galaxy cellphone, according to the statement.
Possession occurred between July 1 and July 15, according to the criminal information filed Tuesday.
One folder with 1,413 items included family photos, church recitals and military photos, including one with Inman wearing a uniform with his name tag, Leiter said. Inman’s military affiliation could not be determined Tuesday.
“Some of the images were of young girls at the beach or pool seemingly unaware of the image being taken,” Leiter said in the probable cause statement.
There were 37 images uploaded to the Synchronoss cloud from 2002-2021, according to her statement.
Three of the first 15 images sent to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children for identification of known victims were confirmed to be children. The NCMEC provided contact information for them, Leiter said.
A victim in one image was part of a closed FBI investigation. Her birth date put her age between 5 and 11 at the time of abuse depicted in images produced between 1998-2003.
A child in another image was identified in a Homeland Security Investigations report on a closed investigation of the “Lexi Series” as “approximately seven to eleven years old during the four-year duration of abuse when the Lexi series of images were created,” Leiter said.
“In some of the images, both depictions of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct and non-nude minors in sexually suggestive poses came from commercial publications or websites,” according to Leiter’s statement.
Inman was interviewed last Thursday at the Sequim Police Department before he was placed under arrest.
His legal profile on the Washington State Bar Association website, wsba.org, identifies him as a private-practice attorney with an active license.
Inman’s WSBA admit date is June 8.
An attorney may be disbarred or suspended if convicted of a felony “involving moral turpitude, in which case the record of conviction shall be conclusive evidence,” according to Washington RCW 2.48.220.
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Senior Staff Writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 55650, or at pgottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
