photo by: Kansas Bureau of Investigation Sex Offender Registry

Bruce Stanley Springsteen

A Lawrence man who was on probation for child pornography convictions was charged with 14 more child pornography counts on Thursday.

Bruce Stanley Springsteen, 65, was charged Thursday with 14 counts of sexual exploitation of a child by possessing explicit media of a child under the age of 18, according to charging documents.

The documents say the charges stem from an incident that took place on June 19. Springsteen was arrested at 3 p.m. Wednesday in the 1000 block of New Hampshire Street by Lawrence police, according to the Douglas County Jail booking log.

In February 2021, Springsteen pleaded no contest to three counts of attempted sexual exploitation of a child, according to court records. The complaint against him in that case alleged that on three occasions between Jan. 29, 2018, and Dec. 23, 2019, Springsteen possessed “any visual depiction” of a child engaging in sexually explicit conduct. Judge Stacey Donovan sentenced Springsteen to 24 months in prison, but then suspended that sentence to 24 months of probation. Springsteen was also required to register as a sex offender for life, according to court records.

On Thursday, Springsteen appeared via Zoom from the Douglas County Jail and said he was planning to retain his defense attorney from his previous case, Nicholas David. Because of Springsteen’s prior conviction, Assistant District Attorney Paula Bustamante asked for Springsteen’s bond to be set at $500,000. She also requested that if Springsteen posted bond, he would be prohibited from accessing the internet.

“This is a significant and disturbing pattern of behavior,” Bustamante said.

Judge Blake Glover agreed to the bond amount and the conditions. He said that under Kansas’ sentencing rules, if Springsteen were convicted of the new charges, he could face a prison sentence of up to 272 months, or more than 22 years.

Springsteen had not posted bond as of Thursday afternoon, according to the Douglas County Jail booking logs.

Several years before his 2021 conviction, Springsteen held jobs where he worked with or near children, as the Journal-World previously reported. From Sept. 17 through Sept. 25, 2015, he was a paraeducator at Pinckney Elementary School, and before that he worked for 15 years as a dishwasher at KU’s Hilltop Child Development Center. In 2020, Lawrence Public Schools spokeswoman Julie Boyle said the school district was “unaware of any concerns raised about the professional conduct of this individual” during his employment with the district, and KU spokeswoman Erinn Barcomb-Peterson said that “he had no unsupervised access to children” when he worked at Hilltop Child Development Center.