Locations
Clarendon Road, Morecambe, Lancashire, LA3
Description
A convicted sex offender has been jailed for failing to tell police he had an Amazon Fire TV Stick and a secret Barclays account.
Steven Woodcock also had 47 indecent child images on his laptop and installed special software to delete and 'scrub' the internet history, a court heard.
The 44-year-old, who was being managed in the community under a sexual harm prevention order (SHPO), was visited by police last year as part of a routine check.
The SHPO prohibited him from using any internet-capable device unless it had the capacity to display and retain the internet history and had to be made available on request for inspection by police.
Prosecutor Emma Kehoe told Preston Crown Court how Woodcock admitted visiting a library in Morecambe 'up to six times a week' to use the internet.
She said officers were 'concerned about their regular visits' and made enquiries with the library.
The National Crime Agency later confirmed that the defendant's email account had been used to upload two 'indicative images' of seven-year-old girls to Instagram, however the images were 'not in themselves unlawful'.
Police then executed a search warrant at Woodcock's home on Clarendon Road West, Morecambe, and asked him if he had any internet-capable devices.
Ms Kehoe said Woodcock had a Kindle in his bedroom and an Amazon Fire TV Stick in a drawer which breached the SHPO.
Officers also found a Halifax bank card and a Barclays savings account which he had never declared.
His laptop contained one category A indecent image of a child - the most serious - and 46 category C images.
Woodcock pleaded guilty to breaching the SHPO and possessing indecent images.
Defence barrister Chris Evans said there were a 'relatively low number of images' and his client had been 'candid in terms of what he has done'.
He told the court that Woodcock had 'engaged well with the probation service' following his last conviction in 2016, deserved credit for his early guilty plea and 'remains motivated to seek help'.
Judge Simon Medland QC said they were 'deliberate and persistent breaches' of the SHPO and jailed Woodcock for two years.
Sentencing, he said: "You have been dealt with on several previous occasions for the possession of unlawful indecent images of children.
"These are real images of real children who are really being abused and that abuse will almost inevitably stay with them for the rest of their lives.
"The internet being what it is, it's quite easy to imagine that those disgusting images will be more of less forever available to people who view them for satisfaction of a perverted sexual interest.
"You had also loaded a cleaning facility to scrub the internet history and confound any investigation.
"You have, over a significant period of time, quite deliberately breached these orders that were made to try to protect children from your predations.
"Even though there were no contact offences here, these were offences where you were looking at unlawful sexual images of children."