A 29-year-old Rock Springs woman has been sentenced to three to five years in prison, says a judge’s order filed Thursday.
Jaycee Morgan Cherny was charged in late May with two counts of child pornography possession and one of child pornography delivery.
Sweetwater County District Court Judge Suzannah Robinson imposed the prison term over a change-of-plea and sentencing hearing that spanned two dates, Sept. 8 and Sept. 18, according to Cherny’s court file.
Cherny received credit for the 136 days she spent in jail while her case was ongoing.
She also must reimburse the state of Wyoming $1,000 for the service of her public defender, Gary Arnell Jr.
Her plea agreement says she was to plead “no contest” to the child pornography charge and guilty to another count of exposing a child to meth, and a third pertaining to smuggling meth into jail using a bodily orifice.
For the latter two charges, Cherny is to complete a probation period, and she could face more prison time if she fails probation, her plea agreement says.
By publication time Friday, Arnell did not return a phone message seeking confirmation on whether Cherny ultimately pleaded “no contest” or guilty.
Sweetwater County Attorney Danny Erramouspe did not return a voicemail request for comment by publication time.
Sweetwater County Attorney Deputy Steven Anselmi-Stith prosecuted this case.
‘Extremely Rare’
It is “extremely rare” to see females charged with child pornography, Ryan Hieb, commander of the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation’s Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task force, told Cowboy State Daily in a June interview.
In his 11 years with ICAC, he’s only overseen one case involving a female: that of Jessica Lynn Dierking, who was sentenced to federal prison in 2020.
Dierking befriended a man in prison in another state and produced the child sex abuse files at his direction, Hieb recalled.
He knew of another female charged before his ICAC tenure, and said her circumstances were similar.
“Kind of the same scenario,” Hieb recalled. “(It was) at the direction of another male, but she was involved in the production.”
The ratio of male to female case defendants for child pornography in Wyoming is probably at least 99.5% males, less than half a percentage of females, said Hieb.
He noted that he doesn’t know the particulars of Cherny’s case. That one was investigated by Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Detective Matt Wharton.
Court Documents Say …
The evidentiary affidavit in Cherny’s case, compiled from the notes of Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Deputy Dakota Carlsen, doesn’t go into detail on what drew law enforcement to suspect her in the first place.
Elsewhere in her court file, however, documents note that Cherny was in and out of jail on the child endangerment and drug-smuggling case.
Carlsen applied for a search warrant for Cherny’s phone April 15, and Rock Springs Circuit Court Judge John Prokos granted that, the document says.
Wharton used a data acquisition system, which unearthed photographs and videos that the phone indicated were sent through a messenger application in February, wrote Carlsen.
Wharton’s extraction revealed three photographs and seven videos of interest.
Carlsen described at least two of those as sexual abuse material involving a prepubescent boy with his nude bottom region exposed in what the camera framing indicated was not a selfie-shot photo — and other sexual circumstances involved.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
