Professor Sentenced in Sex Case

Friday, May 26th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

MIAMI (AP) â€” A professor with a history of preying on boys for sex was sentenced Friday to 105 years in federal prison for smuggling a Honduran boy into the United States to serve as his lover.

Former Florida Atlantic University professor Marvin Hersh, 60, was the first person tried under a 1995 law banning travel abroad for purposes of child sex. He was convicted last year of 10 counts of alien smuggling, passport fraud and child pornography.

The computer scientist and mathematician made an eloquent statement to the judge Friday but admitted nothing. U.S. District Judge Alan Gold said Hersh's crimes were ``at or near the very bottom of the rung of human behavior.''

Hersh, 60, who was arrested in 1996, allegedly first began trading toys, clothing and money for sex with the boy when he was 10. He brought the boy to live with him in Boca Raton when he was 15 and also abused his younger brother and faked a birth certificate to try to show that the older boy was his natural son, prosecutors said.

Defense attorney David Tucker called Hersh an example of people whose ``desires, feelings, compulsions totally overcome their intelligence, their rationality, their moral judgment, which in all other areas of their life is appropriate and rational.''