Nearly one month after pleading guilty on child pornography charges, Eliot Cutler is now in custody at the Hancock County Jail in Ellsworth to begin his nine-month jail sentence.
Cutler, 76, pleaded guilty to four felony counts of possessing child pornography in Hancock County court on May 4. The plea and sentencing was part of a deal reached by prosecutors with Cutler, announced in April.
On Thursday morning, Hancock County Jail Administrator Timothy Richardson said Cutler was “in custody” at the jail. A photo provided by the jail taken Thursday morning showed him in a blue button down shirt.
“Housing concerns will be addressed as needed,” Richardson said, regarding whether Cutler would be housed with the general population.
Cutler will serve nine months in jail of his four year sentence in a jail instead of a state prison because of the duration. Only sentences longer than nine months are served at state prisons. Once released, if Cutler violates his probation, he could be sent to prison for the remainder of the sentence.
Cutler will also have to register as a sex offender for 10 years, make a $5,000 donation to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and serve six years of probation.
The former Maine gubernatorial candidate had 142,000 pornographic images and videos of children saved on his electronic devices when police searched his Brooklin home in March 2022, according to a sentencing memo filed by Hancock County District Attorney Robert Granger. Nearly 84,000 of those images depicted children under age 12, with some of the children as young as 4 to 6 years old, according to the memo.
