Court

Judge: 500 Child Porn Images 'Not Excessive'
Thur 21st April 2011, Mirror

A former teacher who downloaded images of child rape walked free yesterday – even though another judge recommended that he face jail time.

Jonathon Saunders, 40, was threatened with jail last month after it emerged that he had stored hundreds of illegal images on computer equipment given to him by James Hornsby School in Essex, where he worked as a teacher.

He even admitted in a police interview that he had stored his students’ work alongside the depraved images.

Saunders worked at the school for three years and had previously worked at the FitzWimarc School in Rayleigh.

Saunders last month pleaded guilty at Basildon Crown Court to three counts of possessing indecent images of children after police found 472 child porn images on two computers and two hard drives seized from his home last year.

The images ranged from level one, the least serious, to level four, the second most serious, on the copine scale.

The worst of the images showed adult males penetrating and ejaculating over girls aged between four and ten years old.

When Saunders entered his guilty pleas on 11th April, Judge Jonathan Black told the former teacher he faced jail time.

He said, “You’ve pleaded guilty to the three matters on the indictment. The third matter refers to indecent photographs of level four on the copine scale. To my mind that crosses the custody threshold.”

But Saunders walked free from Basildon Crown Court yesterday after a different judge let him off with a 36-month community order.

Judge Christopher Mitchell commented that Saunders’s 500 child porn images were ‘not excessive’ and even denied a prosecution request that the former teacher pay £1200 costs.

The court heard how Saunders was arrested on 5th May 2010 after police received information that he had used his credit card to buy pornography from an internet company known to deal in child porn.

Police seized an Apple Macbook, a compact laptop and two external hard drives. When the equipment was analyzed cops found almost 500 indecent images of children.

In interview Saunders initially denied knowingly downloading child porn and told police that his wife also used the computer.

However, he eventually admitted to paying a £15 subscription to a website which allowed him to download pornography, including pictures of children.

He told cops he had ‘an addiction to internet pornography’ and that he’d even taken one of the computers ‘backwards and forwards to school’.

But a defence barrister yesterday told the court that the images were downloaded mainly in bulk, adding, “The number of individual victims is much lower than the number of images in total.”

Pointing out that most of the images were level one, he moaned about local press coverage of Saunders’s case and told the court that he couldn’t afford to pay costs, saying, “He’s incurred lots of debts after losing his job at the school... He is already in substantial debt. That may well increase.”

Judge Christopher Mitchell commented that the number of images was “certainly not excessive” and told Saunders, “[Your] plea of guilty stands in your favour... You have left your professional job and you will never go back into that field again. I take that into account.”

Saunders was given a 36 month community order, a five year sexual offences prevention order and told to register his address with the police for the next five years.

NB: A version of this story appeared in the Mirror.

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