Community service for looking at ‘old’ indecent images of children

Sunday 12 February 2017

A man previously sent to prison for owning indecent images of children has narrowly avoided going back behind bars after pleading guilty to looking at ‘old’ discs he’d just discovered.

Karl Cardy told the court he’d found the unmarked discs in a drawer and put them in his computer thinking they contained legal pornographic pictures, but that in fact there were also 10 photos of young girls aged around 14-16 years old.

Nine of the photos were at level 1 and the other at level 2. Level 1 is considered to be the least offensive. The rating goes up to level 5.

According to Cardy’s defence advocate he didn’t open the photos “for his own gratification” and as soon as he saw what they showed he quickly skipped through them.

Under the conditions of his previous convictions Cardy was supposed to tell the police if anything like this happened, but it’s claimed he panicked and didn’t let them know. They discovered the discs when they raided his home in connection with an unrelated incident.

Sentencing, Magistrate Sarah Fitz said it had been a “very difficult decision” as to how to deal with the case. She was seriously minded to send Cardy back to prison, but that there were strong mitigating factors. In her opinion the big mistake he had made was holding on to the discs once he’d discovered what was on them: “you could just have thrown them away."

Cardy was given 120 hours community service and put on probation for 18 months.