A Pennsylvania State Police corporal who used his work computers and a secured law-enforcement database to create A.I.-generated pornography and secretly record people — including coworkers — was sentenced on Monday, November 2, in Montgomery County to 5 to 10 years in state prison, followed by seven years of probation. The judge also deemed Stephen M. Kamnik, 40, a sexually violent predator, which means he must register as a sex offender for the rest of his life, Attorney General Dave Sunday announced.
Source: Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General
Kamnik had pleaded guilty to 14 charges in all — nine felonies and five misdemeanors — including sexual abuse of children, unlawful use of a computer, receiving stolen property and official oppression. Monday's sentencing in Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas closes the criminal case that began when the Pennsylvania State Police, in consultation with the Office of Attorney General, charged him last year. PennWatch, the Pennsylvania public-affairs news service, carried the same sentencing details on Monday.
Source: PennWatch
“This high-ranking public servant betrayed his oath and committed numerous crimes — many while on the job when he was supposed to be serving his community,” Attorney General Sunday said in the announcement. “This conviction stains the many hard-working officers who abide by their oath and put their lives on the line every day to keep Pennsylvania safe.” No victim is named in the Attorney General's account of the case, and this report likewise names none.
How investigators say the scheme worked
The investigation was run by the Internal Affairs Division of the Pennsylvania State Police together with the Office of Attorney General. Investigators found that for years Kamnik misused Commonwealth computer resources for his own sexual gratification, including creating A.I.-generated pornography of numerous female citizens of Pennsylvania, according to the Attorney General. Some of the material was created at a Montgomery County state police barracks, on Commonwealth-owned devices — that is, on the equipment of the agency he served.
His cellphone and an external hard drive taken from his home showed a second channel of material: investigators say he used a secured database called JNET — the Commonwealth's justice-network system — to obtain hundreds of photographs of females, in violation of JNET usage policies. JNET is the kind of restricted system whose access is logged and limited to official business precisely because it holds personal information on ordinary residents.
Among the materials investigators recovered was an unlawfully recorded video of a Montgomery County magisterial district judge during a court proceeding, which Kamnik also edited for apparent lewd purposes, the Attorney General's office said. Separately, a search of his vehicle in January 2025 found him in possession of a stolen .22 calibre firearm — the basis of the receiving-stolen-property felony among his guilty pleas.
The full list of convictions
The guilty pleas entered by Kamnik were: four felony counts of unlawful use of computer; sexual abuse of children, a felony; receiving stolen property, a felony, regarding the firearm; unlawful duplication, a felony; interception, disclosure or use of wire, electronic or oral communications, a felony; criminal trespass, a felony; and misdemeanor counts of invasion of privacy, official oppression, tampering with evidence, misapplication of entrusted property, and unlawful use of an audio or video device in court. The case was prosecuted by the Attorney General's Public Corruption and Child Predator Sections.
The photographs at the centre of this case did not come from social media. Prosecutors say they came from inside secured government systems — the same databases that hold the licence and identity photographs of ordinary Pennsylvania residents, including the state's large Punjabi and South Asian communities in Philadelphia and the Harrisburg and Pittsburgh corridors.
Background: a case built inside his own agency
Kamnik was a corporal — a supervisory rank — serving in Montgomery County, the suburban county northwest of Philadelphia. The charges were brought last year after the state police's own internal-affairs investigators, working with the Attorney General, examined his use of Commonwealth systems. The guilty plea covered conduct that investigators described as running for years, not a single incident: creating material on duty, recording individuals without their knowledge, and drawing photographs from a database he was trusted to use only for law-enforcement work.
What happens next
Kamnik now begins a 5-to-10-year state prison term; the exact release point inside that range will be set by parole authorities, and the seven years of probation run after the prison term. The sexually-violent-predator designation imposed Monday carries lifetime registration as a sex offender. For the state police and the agencies that run systems such as JNET, the case leaves the institutional question the Attorney General's statement did not answer: how access to residents' photographs is audited, and how quickly misuse inside a secured database is caught — the issue every driver who has handed a licence photograph to the Commonwealth has a stake in.