Locations
Meadowview Road, Middlesbrough, TS5
Description
A 64-YEAR-OLD husband who downloaded scores of child pornography pictures has walked free from court still maintaining his innocence.
Douglas Gaunt kept his freedom but still refuses to accept responsibility for his crimes in the face of unanimous jury verdicts on 16 charges.
He was found guilty at Teesside Crown Court last month of making 59 indecent images of children by downloading them from the web.
In courts often dealing with cases involving hundreds or thousands of child abuse images, these were deemed to be a small number of pictures.
Judge John Walford said: The fact of the case is that were talking about two specific dates over 21 months ago and a small number of images, for the most part images of the lowest level of seriousness.
He gave Gaunt a community order - as prescribed by sentencing guidelines and suggested by a probation report - with two years supervision.
It will address the sort of factors that caused you to behave uncharacteristically, Im satisfied, on those two occasions, he added yesterday.
Defence counsel Paul Cleasby said Gaunt continued to protest innocence but fulfilled his obligations for the sex offenders register, on which he will remain for five years.
Mr Cleasby said: He is not somebody who ignores the authority of the court.
He has reached 64 without any relevant previous convictions and has blemished his good character by his behaviour in June 2009. It is a very short window of offending.
He added Gaunt found great solace in the support of his wife, he had not offended since and supervising him would benefit the public.
Gaunt, who said he had no intention of having a computer in his home again, was also given a sexual offences prevention order.
The prosecution had told jurors Gaunt, of Meadowview Road, Middlesbrough, was a man with a predilection for searching and looking for sexual images of children.
The photos were found under Gaunts password-protected profile on the family computer after police searched his home on June 12, 2009.
The trial heard how the investigation revealed searches for child pornography and links to 5,000 websites suggestive of child pornography, on Gaunts computer.
Gaunts name, age, the area he lived and hobbies and interests like sex sex sex and young girls were registered on social networking sites.
The police raid sprung from a probe into alleged communication between Gaunt and a convicted sex offender.
In their online chats gauntdouglas, a user name linked to Gaunts email address and home, talked of young prostitutes on Teesside.
Gaunt denied accessing, receiving, saving or searching for pictures of young girls or visiting chat rooms or social networking sites on the internet.
He denied any knowledge of the pictures on his machine and said he didnt know who put them there, but insisted that it was not him.
He commented of some of the images: Ive seen worse on the beach in Spain.