photo by: Journal-World File/KBI Sex Offender Registry

Bruce S. Springsteen is pictured with the Douglas County Judicial and Law Enforcement Center.

A Lawrence man entered a no contest plea in a child pornography case on Friday in Douglas County District Court as part of a deal in which an additional 13 felony counts were dropped.

Bruce Stanley Springsteen, 65, was facing 14 felony counts of sexual exploitation of a child, according to charging documents, but entered a plea to just one count of the lesser felony of attempted exploitation of a child.

During Springsteen’s plea hearing on Friday, Deputy District Attorney Joshua Seiden said that Lawrence police received a tip from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children that Springsteen was attempting to access images of abused children on the internet on June 19, 2022. Police investigated the information and arrested Springsteen.

As the Journal-World reported, Springsteen was arrested on July 20, 2022. He was on probation at the time after a conviction in 2020 for three felony counts of attempted sexual exploitation of a child. He was sentenced by Judge Stacey Donovan in March 2021 to 24 months in prison, which she suspended to 24 months of probation in accordance with Kansas sentencing guidelines. Court records indicate that Springsteen had no prior convictions that affected his sentence. Springsteen was ordered at that time to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.

Seiden said Friday that the plea agreement recommended 68 months in prison for Springsteen’s new conviction and for that sentence to run consecutively with his previous 24-month sentence for a total of 92 months, or more than 7.5 years. After he serves his sentence, Springsteen will be subject to parole supervision for the rest of his life, Seiden said.

Donovan scheduled Springsteen to be sentenced on March 6. He has been in custody on a $500,000 bond since his arrest in July 2022.

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 school district 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.