Lemhi man sentenced to rider after pleading guilty to three counts of child porn

LEMHI – A Lemhi County man has been placed on a rider after pleading guilty to three felony counts of possessing child pornography.

Joshua Twain Gibbs, 43, was charged on May 28 with three felony counts of sexual exploitation of a child through possession of explicit materials involving a child. The potential punishment for the felony count is a maximum penalty of 10 years and requiring Gibbs to register as a sex offender.

On Nov. 18, he accepted a plea agreement in which he agreed to plead guilty to the three counts in exchange for the state not filing any additional charges of possession found in the case. The state recommended a sentence for each count to run concurrently of a unified sentence of four years, two fixed and two indeterminate.

On Jan. 14, 7th Judicial District Judge Stevan Thompson sentenced Gibbs to a determinate period of custody of six years and four years indeterminate for all three counts to run concurrently. However, Thompson then retained jurisdiction, meaning Gibbs would complete a rider treatment program in prison for one year. Once the program is done, Thompson can decide whether to send Gibbs to prison for his given sentence or release him onto probation.

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Gibbs was also ordered to register as a sex offender.

According to the probable cause affidavit, a search warrant was served on Gibbs’s residence in Salmon, where his laptops, cell phone, external hard drives and other storage media drives were seized. Investigators downloaded his phone’s contents, and multiple images were found of web pages that contained explicit material about children. Three images described in the affidavit were of boys between 7 and 10 years old.

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