A man whose conviction on child pornography charges won him an unusual champion — the trial judge, Jack B. Weinstein — was sentenced on Thursday to five years in prison, the minimum sentence required by law.
Even then, Judge Weinstein, of Federal District Court in Brooklyn, was compassionate toward the defendant, allowing him to remain free for two more months, and dismissive of the government’s efforts to get a longer sentence.
In 2005, the defendant, Pietro Polizzi, 57, of Queens, signed up for a pornography Web site and began collecting thousands of explicit images involving children. Federal prosecutors said some images showed children as young as 3 years old.
But Judge Weinstein, who is known for strong opinions about the rights of defendants, has thrown out a conviction of Mr. Polizzi, and ruled that he did not need to wear an electronic ankle bracelet while awaiting a new trial.
Last year, in an interview with The New York Times, Judge Weinstein said he believed that mandatory sentences were misapplied to people who viewed child pornography, as opposed to those who produced the images.
“We’re destroying lives unnecessarily,” he said then. “At the most, they should be receiving treatment and supervision.”
In 2007, a jury found Mr. Polizzi guilty of receiving and possessing child pornography. Under federal sentencing guidelines, he was eligible for a term of 11 to 14 years in prison. That is what the government requested Thursday.
But the judge responded: “I find it grossly excessive. Therefore, a guideline sentence is not imposed.”
Instead, Judge Weinstein ordered that Mr. Polizzi serve the mandatory minimum of five years.
He also gave Mr. Polizzi eight weeks before beginning the sentence. Federal prosecutors had asked that Mr. Polizzi be taken into custody immediately, saying he was guilty of a crime of violence.
Again, the judge disagreed.
“Calling it a crime of violence for this purpose seems to me a strange treatment of language,” Judge Weinstein said, adding that he would not require the defendant to start serving his sentence right away. “It does seem to me to be a form of cruel and unusual punishment and punitive in nature.”
Robert Nardoza, a spokesman for the United States attorney’s office in Brooklyn, said, “An appeal is under consideration by this office.”
During his trial, in 2007, Mr. Polizzi used an insanity defense, saying he had been repeatedly raped as a child and had collected the pornographic pictures not for sexual gratification, but in hopes of finding evidence of his own abuse — claims the prosecution dismissed as implausible. When the first of the images were shown in court, Mr. Polizzi collapsed and was taken to a hospital.
He was eventually convicted of all 12 counts of receiving child pornography and 11 counts of possession.
Then, in a departure from custom, Judge Weinstein asked the jurors if knowing about the mandatory five-year sentence would have changed their views. Some said yes. The judge sentenced Mr. Polizzi to a year in prison for the possession count, then ordered a new trial on the other charges. The Court of Appeals later reversed that order.
On Thursday, Mr. Polizzi made a lengthy statement, sometimes emotional and sometimes rambling. He condemned those who create child pornography and maintained his own innocence. As a youth in Sicily, he said, he disclosed to a priest that he had been abused and was told only to avoid that behavior in the future.
“I cannot live as a normal person,” he said. “I’m not an abuser; I’m a victim.”
A federal prosecutor, Allen Bode, challenged that assertion and said the money that Mr. Polizzi had spent on pornography had subsidized abuse.
“The jury rejected Mr. Polizzi’s claim that his alleged abuse caused him to seek out child pornography,” Mr. Bode said. “He was simply interested in this material.”
