Locations
Lower Dee View Road, Greenfield, Holywell, Flintshire, CH8.
Description
A teenager claimed he had been bullied in school to look at indecent images of children.
But an investigation showed he continued to search for such images after he left school. It was said in court to have become an addiction.
Morgan Andrew Abbott, 18, of Lower Dee View Road in Greenfield, Holywell, was given a chance of a suspended sentence.
At Mold Crown Court, Judge Niclas Parry gave him a 16 month youth custody sentence but suspended it for two years.
He was ordered to carry out 100 hours unpaid work and he was placed on 60 days rehabilitation.
Abbott was ordered to register with the police as a sex offender for 10 years and a 10 year sexual harm prevention order was also made.
He admitted he made by downloading 115 indecent images and movies of children at the most serious category A; 99 images at category B, and 288 images and movies of children at category C.
Abbott admitted that in November last year he distributed indecent images/movies of children in all three categories using Skype.
He admitted possessing 244 prohibited images of children and possessing six extreme images, which portrayed, in an explicit and realistic way, a person performing an oral sex act on a dog.
Judge Parry told him it took a police investigation and his arrest for him to realise the seriousness of what he had been involved with.
He had searched for material which depicted the abuse of very young children.
It has taken this prosecution for you to understand that children who are abused suffer trauma which is immeasurable, he said.
His case was seriously aggravated by the fact some of the images had been shared, he said.
Judge Parry warned the distribution offences could attract sentences of up to five years.
But he was only 18, he committed the offences when he was immature, inquisitive and nave, and experimenting sexually.
He had no previous convictions and he had pleaded guilty.
If he received an immediate sentence then he would be released relatively early without any of the issues and problems he had being addressed, the judge told him. He had therefore decided to suspend the sentence.
Robin Boag, defending, said his client was a young man of good character with no convictions who had pleaded guilty at an early stage.
The distribution was limited to two individuals in November of last year.
He had initially been bullied into doing it but he accepted it had carried on from there.
There had been some encouragement and then he accepts it became an addiction, he said.