A former Allen & Overy (A&O) New York partner has been sentenced to 17 and a half years in prison after pleading guilty to the sex trafficking of a child and distributing child pornography.

Edward DeSear was jailed after admitting to molesting a child, according to a press release issued last week by the US Department of Justice. 

DeSear admitted that he arranged for the young boy to travel from Paris to Brussels and sexually abused the child. DeSear partly facilitated the boy's international travel by paying cash to the boy's father.

According to court filings, between May 2010 and February 2011 DeSear distributed "hundreds" of video and image files depicting young children being sexually abused via a peer-to-peer file-sharing program.

At a Newark federal court, US district judge William Martini ordered De Sear to pay a $25,000 (£15,300) fine alongside his prison term and sentenced him to a lifetime of supervised release. He was also ordered to pay $1.2 million in restitution to his victims.

The former partner joined A&O's New York office in 2010 before resigning after he was first charged in 2011.

DeSear was initially arrested in July 2011 on a federal complaint charging him with distribution of child pornography. He was released on bail and taken into custody again in August 2012, when he was charged with further multiple offenses related to images of children being sexually abused.

A&O declined to comment, pointing out it had been "a number of years" since DeSear left the firm.

DeSear once chaired Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe's structured finance practice. He had joined Orrick in 1993 from Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy, which he joined as partner in 1988. He left Orrick in 2003 to join the partnership at McKee Nelson, which was acquired by Bingham in 2009.