By NEAL WAGNER / City Editor

A 61-year-old Alabaster man and former substitute bus driver for Shelby County Schools will spend the next three decades in prison after he was sentenced on May 9 for producing child pornography.

The sentencing came about four months after Alabaster resident Michael Wayne Wooten pleaded guilty to the charges. Wooten, a retired Birmingham police officer, formerly served as a security officer with Birmingham City Schools from July 1997-May 2011, and worked as a substitute Shelby County bus driver from May 2011 until his arrest six months later.

During the May 9 sentencing in the Hugo Black U.S. Courthouse in Birmingham, U.S. District Judge Inge Johnson ordered Wooten to spend 30 years in prison and be placed on supervised release for the rest of his life after his prison term.

“Restoring the innocence and trust this defendant stole from his victims is impossible, but the judge’s sentence punishes him for the harm he did and ensures he will never exploit another child,” Vance said. “This defendant will be eligible for release when he is 91. Today, we confirm that victimizing children by taking sexually explicit photographs of them is abhorrent criminal behavior and it will be not tolerated.”

During the hearing, prosecutors said Wooten exploited 11 children from August 2009 to April 2010 by using an office at Dupuy Elementary School in Birmingham to take modeling photos of numerous juvenile girls.

After one of these modeling sessions, one of the victims told her parents of potentially inappropriate conduct by Wooten, according to court documents. A subsequent search of Wooten’s Alabaster residence yielded multiple computers containing child pornography images, including images produced by Wooten depicting several victims between 4 and 9 years old engaged in sexually explicit conduct.

“Mr. Wooten used his position as a school security guard to gain access to young children,” assistant U.S. Attorney Lanny Breuer wrote in a press release. “But rather than protect school students, he sexually abused them and captured this abuse in dozens of photographs.  Today, appropriately, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison.”