A former Cayuga County resident will spend the rest of his life in prison.
34-year-old Steven Valder, of Syracuse, was sentenced Thursday to Life imprisonment plus 10 years following his trial conviction for sexual exploitation and child pornography offenses. United States Attorney Carla B. Freedman and Craig L. Tremaroli, Special Agent in Charge of the Albany Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation made the announcement.
Following a jury trial in June, Valder was convicted of two counts of Sexual Exploitation of a Child for producing sexually explicit images of a 13-year-old boy in 2023, one count of Committing a Felony Offense Against a Minor as a Registered Sex Offender, and one count of Receipt of Child Pornography. The jury also found that Valder committed the Sexual Exploitation offenses after a prior conviction for a sex offense against a minor.
On Thursday, he was sentenced to concurrent mandatory life sentences on each of the two sexual exploitation counts, a concurrent sentence of 40 years for his receipt of child pornography over the internet, and a mandatory consecutive 10 years for committing the exploitation offenses as a registered sex offender.
The evidence at trial showed that approximately one year after being released from prison for 2010 convictions in Cayuga County Court for Criminal Sexual Act in the First Degree (forcible anal sexual conduct with a 14-year-old child for which he received a 10-year sentence), and in Federal Court for transportation and possession of child pornography (for which he received a 15-year sentence), Valder produced sexually explicit images of a 13-year old boy, who he sexually abused multiple times over a period of months in multiple locations around the City of Syracuse. Valder, who also downloaded child pornography over the Internet through Russian applications he had downloaded to his phone, was a registered sex offender on both federal supervised release and state parole at the time of his offenses.
Valder’s crimes were discovered after his United States Probation Officer found him in possession of an unauthorized smartphone on which the images of the child victim and internet child pornography were found.
This case was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Albany Division Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force, the New York State Police, and the United States Probation Office. Assistant U.S. Attorney Lisa M. Fletcher, Project Safe Childhood Coordinator for the Northern District of New York, prosecuted the case.
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