Damon Rallis, a longtime Southold Town building department employee and one-time candidate for Town Supervisor, will not be sentenced as expected this week due to his attorney’s scheduling conflicts.
Mr. Rallis was set to be sentenced in federal district court in Islip on Wednesday, Jan. 22 by Judge Joan Azrack, however, his attorney, Jason Russo, submitted a request dated Jan. 16 to push back the court date another 60 days. The new sentencing date is currently set for Tuesday, March 11 at 3 p.m. Mr. Rallis faces a minimum of five years and a maximum of 20 years in prison.
“I am presently on trial with a homicide case in Nassau County and will be engaged for several more weeks, interfering with other scheduled matters,” Mr. Russo’s letter read. “I have communicated with [Assistant United States Attorney Paul] Scotti, and he has no objection to this request.”
Mr. Rallis pleaded guilty to possession of child sex abuse materials in April 2023 and was initially scheduled to be sentenced in October 2023. This is the third time Mr. Rallis’s sentencing has been delayed — his case was previously adjourned to give the United States Probation Department additional time to complete Mr. Rallis’s pre-sentence report.
For more than a year following this first adjournment, there had been no word on a sentencing date until the fall of 2024, when a hearing notice was issued for Nov. 14. Mr. Russo requested the sentencing be pushed to January 2025 at that time, citing that he had a “full trial calendar for the next six week” and was in the middle of preparing sentencing materials with Mr. Rallis.
According to court documents, Mr. Rallis, who previously served as vice chairman of Southold Town’s Democratic Committee, became the subject of a federal investigation after he reportedly shared a pair of sexually explicit videos of toddlers with an undercover FBI agent. The images were distributed via an “invite-only” group chat on the social media platform Kik in 2020 under the online alias “dirtydaddy431.”
Investigators executed a search warrant and raided Mr. Rallis’ Southold home in February 2021. At an arraignment hearing later that year, Mr. Scotti said agents discovered a hidden camera that was angled to capture images of visitors using the bathroom in his home.
During the raid, Mr. Rallis, who had been a Boy Scout master in Greenport, admitted to law enforcement that he had viewed and posted child sex abuse materials and that he would delete images after viewing them, according to a sworn affidavit from an FBI special agent.
Following his guilty plea in April 2023, Mr. Rallis was released on a $200,000 bond and placed on house arrest, however, an application was granted to allow Mr. Rallis to leave his residence between the hours of 9 a.m. and 3 p.m.