A WINCHESTER postman who admitted having more than 200 indecent images of children on his computer has escaped a jail term.
Police swooped on Stephen Smith’s home last April following a tip-off from an ex-housemate.
They found 217 child pornography images in a temporary Internet folder on his Pc.
Gail Toulon, prosecuting at Winchester Crown Court, said Smith, 40, of Winnall Manor Road, Winnall, had searched for the images through search engine Google on June 15, 2005.
All but four of the files found on his computer were deemed to be grade-one pictures, at the lowest end of the scale of offending.
Richard Wheeler, mitigating, said Smith had only visited the child pornography website for four minutes and that he had not implicitly downloaded the pictures himself. Instead, they were put on his desktop as a matter of course by Microsoft, as with any other website.
He said: “These images were in a temporary Internet folder and it may be that when one accesses a web page a number of images are on there. Come what may what images are on that page are downloaded.” Sentencing him to 175 hours’ unpaid community work, Judge John Dixon said: “There is a wide range of possible behaviour, between at one end someone who is overcome by curiosity and the other end a hardened pervert who collects these awful images.
“You’re someone who was overcome with curiosity to see what these images were like. In my judgement these offences are not serious enough to demand a prison sentence.”
Smith has to pay £200 costs and place himself on the sex offenders’ register for five years.
