Man jailed over child porn on computer

Mar 28 2008 by Our Correspondent, Western Mail

A WAREHOUSEMAN was jailed yesterday after police raided his home and found 1,800 pornographic images of children on a computer in his bedroom.

Dino John Thomas, 49, was said at Mold Crown Court to have found it to be “compulsive” and he had no real explanation for why he had done it.

North Wales Police were tipped off by the Child Exploitation On-Line Protection Unit in London, that he was downloading illegal images of children.

They executed a search warrant at his home address at Normanby Drive in Connah’s Quay and seized the computer, which had 1,826 still images and 20 video images upon it.

Prosecutor Matthew Kerruish-Jones said that nine of the images were among the worst possible imaginable.

Thomas admitted 17 offences of making indecent images and one charge of possessing the whole collection and was jailed for five months.

He was ordered to register with the police as a sex offender for the next seven years and he was also made the subject of a Sexual Offences Prevention Order (SOPO) to curb his activities in future.

Judge John Rogers QC said that a custodial sentence was inevitable for such offences, both to punish the defendant, and to deter others from committing offences of that nature.

The judge said that he followed the guidelines of the Court of Appeal and the Sentencing Guidelines Council.

He took into account his guilty plea, the fact that he was a man of previous excellent character and that he had a good work record.

The court heard how the police were tipped off in February last year and a couple of days later executed a warrant under The Protection of Children Act.

Interviewed, he accepted that he was the sole user of the computer, which he had bought in 2004, and he had accessed adult porn sites and also looked at images of children in a state of undress.

The hi-tech police department discovered the images downloaded in a single user account named Dino between July 2006 and March of last year.

The majority were images of young females aged between eight and 12. The videos were of teenage girls aged between 13 and 16, mainly on modelling sets.

Interviewed, he denied seeing some of the more serious images. He claimed he appreciated their aesthetic quality rather than using them for sexual pleasure.