Locations
Long Wittenham, Oxfordshire
Description
Jurors convicted a man of breaching his court order by having unsupervised contact with two children.
Alan Thompson, 56, of Long Wittenham, was originally given his sexual offences prevention order after he was convicted 15-years-ago of sexual activity with a child. The order bans him from having unsupervised contact with children, unless he had the permission of the child’s parents or the contact was ‘inadvertent’.
CCTV at the hotel where Thompson was staying in November 2020 showed him driving his mobility scooter towards his ground floor room – followed by a teenage boy and girl, Oxford Crown Court heard. The pair went to the toilet, while he went to his bedroom.
He was allowed to be with the boy, as the child’s guardian was aware of his previous convictions.
But despite Thompson’s claims to the contrary, the girl’s mother told jurors she had no idea that he was a registered sex offender.
Cross-examined on Monday, it was put to the woman that she had been aware of his past and had even replied to Thompson’s confession of his past offending with the words: “Okay, thanks for telling me, we’ll leave it in the past where it belongs.”
However, she maintained she ‘didn’t know nothing about his background’.
Jurors convicted Thompson on Tuesday (February 7) of breaching his sexual offences prevention order. He will be sentenced next month, with Judge Ian Pringle KC ordering a pre-sentence report.
The maximum sentence for the offence is five years’ imprisonment, although punishments vary depending on the blameworthiness of the offender and the amount of harm they have caused.