A man who tried to reduce his sentence for downloading indecent images of a child has lost his appeal.
42-year-old Paul Fox was sentenced to 4 years and 6 months in prison last January, for two counts of ‘making indecent images of a child’.
Fox was on a 3-year extended licence at the time of his arrest for these offences – having already been released from jail after serving part of a 33-month prison term, for “strikingly similar offending”, said the Judge who sentenced him.
He was recalled to prison while the new offences were dealt with and his sentence for those offences is not due to start until September this year once his previous extended sentence is fulfilled.
When he was sentenced for the more recent offences, Judge Russel Finch made clear in his remarks that the four and a half year jail term should start when the original sentence is finished and not run concurrently with it.
That is now being played out, but Fox appealed that aspect of his sentence, saying it was unfair, and that the sentence itself was “manifestly excessive”.
Defence Advocate Samuel Steel represented Fox when his appeal was heard earlier this month, arguing that his latest prison sentence should be backdated to when he was first arrested, in August 2023.
Advocate Steel said that adding the new sentence on at the end of the existing sentence would take away any chance of early release that Fox could have attained.
Advocate Steel also suggested that the court hadn’t taken mitigation, such as “the death of Fox’s mother, his social isolation, and the struggle with his (trans) identity in the community and his difficult childhood”, into account when sentencing him to four and a half years in prison.
He said that more than 25% discount should have been given against the maximum possible sentence for those reasons and the fact that Fox pleaded guilty to his crimes and cooperated with the police investigation.
The Court of Appeal, headed up by Jonathan Crow CVO KC, David Perry KC, and The RT Hon James Wolf KC, disagreed with the defence when they heard Fox’s appeal earlier this month.
They backed up the initial sentence saying that “the Appellant was sentenced for serious offences of a type for which he had previously been sentenced. The sentence properly marked the gravity of his offending and properly respected the principle of totality. The sentence is neither wrong in principle nor manifestly excessive and we dismiss the appeal.”
This means that Fox’s four and a half year sentence will commence in September 2025, once he’s completed his full prison sentence for the prior offences.