New Jersey Ex-Assemblyman Gets 5 Years for Child Pornography

The former chairman of the New Jersey Assembly’s insurance committee has been sentenced to five years in prison for distributing child pornography.

Former Assemblyman Neil M. Cohen, of Paramus, has also been barred from any public employment or elected office, and he will be required to register as a sex offender.

He has been temporarily sent back to the Trenton Psychiatric Hospital, where he had been involuntarily committed, while the Department of Corrections works out how Cohen will be placed in the prison system.

He pleaded guilty in April to charges that he looked at child pornography on a computer in a legislative district office in Union Township and printed copies of images of child pornography that he placed in the desk of a female receptionist in the office.

Cohen, who served on the New Jersey Assembly committee for 16 years, resigned in 2008 when the charges first came to light.