August 2004
Soham detective jailed for child porn lies
Brian Stevens, the Soham detective, has been jailed for eight months for conspiring to pervert the course of justice by lying to avoid child pornography charges.
Stevens, 43, was found guilty at the Old Bailey of concocting an alibi to avoid charges when pornographic images were found on his laptop computer.
Louise Austin, a Crown Prosecution Service worker who backed up the alibi, was found guilty of the same offence. She was given a six-month sentence, suspended for two years.
Stevens falsely claimed he was staying at the home of his friend Miss Austin, 32, when the images were downloaded and that he did not have his computer with him at the time.
The jury of five women and seven men began their deliberations on Wednesday afternoon at the end of a two-week trial.
Sentencing the pair, Judge Gerald Gordon, said: “You will both lose yourcareers in which you have been involved for many years. In the course of them each of you have done public service.”
Turning to Stevens he said he regarded a prison sentence as “inevitable”.
Stevens, a detective constable with Cambridgeshire Police at the time of the Soham killings two years ago, was a liaison officer for the family of Jessica Chapman.
The Chapman family have issued a statment saying: “The use of our grief as part of Brian Stevens’ defence in his trail has left us with a sense of betrayal.”
Mark Leech, prisons expert and editor of the Prisons Handbook, said Stevens could be released from jail in as little as eight weeks.
He said: “Under current rules he must serve a minimum of a quarter of his sentence, that is two months, and he will then be eligible for release on Home Detention Curfew, know as ‘the tag’.”
Miss Austin, 32, an executive case officer for the Crown Prosecution Service, backed up the fake alibi and was also convicted of conspiring to pervert the course of justice at the Old Bailey.
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