Ex-professor gets 5 years in obscenity case

A former University of South Alabama professor was sentenced to five years and three months in prison Thursday for attempting to send obscene material to a minor.

A federal judge in Miami also ordered that Barry Simpson, 44, be supervised for three years after his release. Simpson, who had been under home confinement, was taken into custody immediately, according to federal court files.

FBI agents arrested Simpson in his Mobile home in November of last year. The case was being handled in Miami, where the FBI's investigation began.

Simpson pleaded guilty in June in the U.S. District Court in the Southern District in Miami.

Celeste S. Higgins, an assistant federal public defender in Miami who represented Simpson, did not respond to Press-Register calls seeking comment.

The case stemmed from conversations between Simpson and an undercover FBI special agent pretending to be a 13-year-old girl in an Internet chat room, according to a statement issued jointly by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida and the FBI's Miami Field Office.

Simpson "approached the undercover agent and initiated a conversation," according to the statement, and "transmitted clothed pictures of himself and sexually explicit material to the agent."

Court filings said the FBI "identified 105 images depicting child pornography and 68 images as depicting child erotica" on Simpson's office computer at USA.

He had been on the faculty as an economics professor since 2003, but was fired after entering the guilty plea earlier this year.