08:00 AM CST on Tuesday, November 15, 2005

By Scott E. Williams / Galveston County Daily News

GALVESTON — A 56th State District Court jury took less than an hour Monday to find a man guilty of possessing hundreds of images of child pornography, including pictures he appeared to have taken himself.

Michael A. Krause, 48, faces a possible prison term of two to 10 years when the jury returns today to resume deliberating punishment in the case.

A woman whose 12-year-old son was staying in Krause’s mobile home in Gilchrist testified that she found compact discs containing child pornography while collecting her son’s things in February 2004.

Investigators later found images depicting young boys engaged in sexual acts.

Prosecutor Bret Griffin apologized to jurors as he showed pictures of children having sex while making his closing arguments Monday morning.

Investigators also found images of a nude boy the woman identified as her son.

Defense attorney Bruce Mauzy told jurors someone else could have planted what he called “vile, nasty stuff” on Krause’s computer. Another possibility was that a computer virus loaded the images onto Krause’s home and laptop computers, the attorney said.

“It hasn’t been shown how those images got on there,” Mauzy said. “The connection’s not there. It does not compute.”

Griffin told jurors that many of the images had been duplicated onto discs in Krause’s possession and that some of the images depicted surroundings identical to Krause’s residence.

Griffin argued that the virus theory was unlikely, unless “someone broke into his house, took those pictures, put them on the Internet — and then the virus just happened to reach out and put them on his computer.”

Mauzy also argued that the woman gained the images by illegal means, since she had to break into the trailer.

However, Griffin noted that the child had been staying at the trailer with Krause’s consent.

Griffin said the boy had let the mother in.

“He has every right to be there,” Griffin said.