Man Sentenced to Prison for ‘Upskirting’ (Ta)

NEWS RELEASE –

June 29, 2018

Contact: Ken Lane, 720-913-9025

FORMER STATE WORKER SENTENCED TO PRISON FOR ‘UPSKIRTING’

A former state government worker who was found guilty of taking videos and pictures up the skirts of co-workers and other unsuspecting women with his mobile phone and for other unlawful videotaping of others was sentenced today in Denver District Court.

Thanh Ta (dob: 04-30-1974) was found guilty in April after a six-day jury trial of sexual assault (F3), as well as stalking (F5), invasion of privacy for sexual gratification (M1), and criminal attempt to commit invasion of privacy for sexual gratification (M2).  He was sentenced today to a total of 12 years in prison for the six stalking convictions (two years for each conviction, to be served consecutively), and to 20 years-to life sex offender intensive supervision probation (SOISP) for the sexual assault conviction once he is released from prison.  The defendant was also variously sentenced to 1 year to 18 months in Denver county jail on each of the 10 invasion of privacy misdemeanor convictions, those sentences to run concurrently to the felony sentences.  Ta was arrested and charged in October 2017.

In September 2017 Colorado Department of Education personnel alerted Denver police that they had discovered numerous files, possibly of “pornographic,” nature, on an external hard drive owned by Ta but which had been connected at some point to the CDE system. Many of the files were marked with the names of current and former female employees, and contained videos and photos of the females’ intimate parts underneath their skirts or other areas of their body, taken at work or elsewhere while they were not looking.  Other, non-employee, names were listed in separate files.  Education personnel were able to retrieve approximately 250,000 files from the external hard drive, including most of the files deleted by Ta after officials had first discovered them, and the files were provided to Denver police.  Most of the thousands of photos and videos found in the files were taken from 2011 until 2017.  In addition to co-worker victims, Ta took similar videos and pictures of hundreds of unsuspecting women in public places.

-30-