105-Year Sentence Upheld Against Ex-FAU Professor
By Catherine Wilson
Originally published by The Associated Press, July 18, 2002
MIAMI — A 105-year prison sentence has been upheld against a Boca Raton professor convicted of smuggling a Honduran boy into the United States to serve as his lover.
Prosecutors charged former Florida Atlantic University professor Marvin Hersh had a 20-year history of preying on boys before he became the first person indicted under a 1995 law banning foreign travel for sex with children.
The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals called Hersh's case a "sordid story of sexual predation" in its decision Wednesday upholding the federal conviction and long sentence.
Hersh, 62, a computer scientist and mathematician, was convicted of 10 counts of alien smuggling, passport fraud and child pornography in 1999.
A three-judge panel of the appeals court said U.S. District Judge Alan Gold made a mistake on his sentencing calculation, but the trial judge said he would have reached the same sentence a different way as well.
Hersh claimed the sentence was improperly driven by the desired result, but the appeals court said Gold "offered three independent and altogether sufficient reasons justifying its upward departure."
Hersh molested four siblings age 10 to 18 in Honduras, part of a family of 14 living in a one-room hut with a palm-thatched roof and dirt floor.
He brought one of the boys to live with him in Boca Raton when the boy was 15 and faked a birth certificate to pass him off as his son.
Investigators also found evidence that Hersh sexually molested other children as young as 8 from the United States, Honduras, Mexico and the Dominican Republic.
"Hersh is more than a pedophile conspiring to have sex with minors. He is a predator of the young and unfortunate," Gold said at sentencing. "Hersh's just punishment requires that he spend the remainder of his life where he can do no more harm."
