Published date: 13 February 2017 |
Published by: Staff reporterRead more articles by Staff reporter
A man has been convicted of illegally downloading indecent images of children.
Steven Anthony Jones, 34, admitted doing it, but claimed it was part of a criminal investigation.
He said he was searching for people he believed to be responsible for historic sex abuse.
His barrister David Leathley said the prosecution case was accepted, but it was Jones’ case he had a statutory defence because it was part of a criminal investigation.
Prosecuting barrister Simon Mintz said the defence was available to law enforcement officers who needed such protection when investigating cases, but the defence argued it was not restricted to police officers.
Mr Mintz claimed the defendant’s version was a “smokescreen” to avoid responsibility for what he had done.
The prosecutor claimed it was like looking for a “needle in a haystack which would take a thousand years”.
He alleged the search terms he had used indicated a search for children, not adults who abused children, and said they rarely showed their faces in such images.
Jones, a man of previous good character, from Celyn Park, Carmel, near Holywell, pleaded not guilty to three charges of unlawfully downloading indecent movies and images of children between May 8 and July 25 last year.
He was convicted and the court heard that there were five category A videos – the worst kind involving penetration – two category B images and one category B video, and eight category C images, the least serious involving sexual posing.
The children were aged between five and 15 and involved both males and females.
They were already deleted, but were detected by the police hi-tec crime unit.
Interviewed, the defendant said he had accidently downloaded them when looking for adult pornography.
He said he was interested in older men, not children.
But in his later defence statement he said he had done it as part of a genuine investigation into crime in he was looking for people he believed had committed historical sex offences.
After the unanimous convictions by the jury, Judge Rhys Rowlands bailed him pending sentence.
He ordered him to register with the police as a sex offender and said that the defendant should be open and frank with the probation service so that the court could consider an alternative to custody.
But if the report said that he was still in denial and that he “maintained all sorts of nonsense” then that would be more difficult, he warned.
http://www.leaderlive.co.uk/news/172429/carmel-man-claimed-downloaded-indecent-images-were-for-a-crime-investigation.aspx
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