A MAN has been jailed for a year for downloading what a judge described as “horrific” indecent images and video footage of children.
Shaun Morley, 30, of Baker Road, Bournemouth, admitted 15 counts of making indecent images of children, which covered 48 indecent pictures, and he asked the court to take into consideration 43 other similar offences.
Bournemouth Crown Court heard 17 of the pictures were at the lower levels of a five-category scale of seriousness while the remaining images fell into categories three and four as well as one in the most serious category.
Morley was arrested at home on May 1 last year when police seized his computer and he later admitted in police interviews to having downloaded indecent images.
Kate Lumsdon, defending, asked the court to spare him jail in favour of a rehabilitation course.
She said: “He is very unusual. He has no sexual experience and is exceptionally naive and a man like that who goes to an adult prison is going to have the most dreadful time and it is not going to teach him anything.
“He has difficulties in accepting and understanding that what he did was illegal and the problems that arise and could be caused when images like that were produced in the first place,” she added.
Sentencing Morley to a total of 12 months in prison, Judge Samuel Wiggs said: “These serious offences of making, by downloading images of children from the internet, are of the most horrific nature.
“They really are extremely unpleasant. One shudders to think the effect that must have had on these children who were involved in the making of these images in the first place.”
Morley was also banned from working with children and ordered to register as a sex offender for 10 years.
