PENSIONER HAD ALMOST 24,000 INDECENT IMAGES OF CHILDREN
A PENSIONER found with almost 24,000 indecent images of children as young as two on his computer has avoided an immediate jail sentence after a court heard he was a carer for his 97-year-old mother.Brian Middleton, 70, was handed 15 months imprisonment suspended for 18 months at Bradford Crown Court.
He will also have to register as a sex offender for the next ten years.
Mr Recorder Abdul Iqbal KC told Middleton: “Anyone reading a press report of this case might well conclude that you richly deserve an immediate sentence of imprisonment irrespective of your age and your caring responsibilities.
But I must also have regard to the risk that you pose generally, and the impact of an immediate sentence upon others for whom you care and who are blameless.” The court heard police went to Middleton’s home on January 23 last year after receiving information concerning a computer’s IP address.
They seized various devices including a desktop computer.
When analysed it was found to contain 23,728 indecent images of children dating back to 2013 including 1,736 in Category A, the most serious.
Female children aged between three years and 10 years were featured among the Category A images, with children as young as two in the Category C images.
Prosecutor Camille Morland told the court: “It had been going on for a long period of time.” After first denying what he had done Middleton later admitted the offences and timescale involved.
Mitigating, Abigail Langford said Middleton had an elderly and dependant mother and invited the court to suspend any period of imprisonment as public protection was best served by tailored work by the probation service.
Sentencing Middleton, of Clover Hill Road, Halifax, Recorder Iqbal said the thousands of images found on his computer had been downloaded “to satisfy your sexual interest in children.” He added: “The images themselves are depressingly of the type that come before the courts all too often.
This type of offending is not victimless.
Should you think that trawling the internet to download images such as this does not harm anyone else, then you would be very wrong.
It is this kind of behaviour committed by you that creates a market.
To supply the images to feed the market created by you and others, children are seriously harmed.
This is far from a victimless crime.
What it does is fuel international, national, and regional activity involving the abuse of children sexually.
You have the care of a very old mother.
I don’t know whether she even knows the predicament that you are in and the dilemma that this would cause if you went to prison immediately.
It is for those principal reasons that I take the view that the public is better served by the Probation Service intervening in your case now to try to reduce the risk of you behaving in this way again and to allow your mother to avoid the distress of seeing her son being incarcerated immediately.” Middleton must register as a sex offender for the next ten years.
He must also abide by a 10-year Sexual Harm Prevention Order.
He was ordered to undertake 40 rehabilitation activity requirement days, to pay court costs of £500, and the victim surcharge.
The computer was ordered to be forfeited and destroyed.
