Andrew Davidson 63

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A SERIAL paedophile was told by a judge to throw his laptop away in order to prevent him committing further crimes.

Andrew Davidson, 63, from Belmore Gardens, Lymington, has a history of downloading child abuse images and breaching sexual harm prevention orders.

He was jailed for ten months in 2018 in Nottingham, where he was living at the time, for possessing thousands of indecent photos of children including Category A – the most severe.

At that time Davidson was under a SHPO imposed for a similar offence in 2006, for which he was given a suspended sentence and ordered to take part in an internet sex offenders treatment programme.

In 2021 he again breached an SHPO order and was given a suspended prison sentence. Another order was also imposed.

But a jury a Southampton Crown Court heard in November he breached it again.

An offender monitoring firm were alerted in October last year that he had downloaded software on a laptop which enabled him to browse sites undetected.

It meant, said prosecutor Harvey Keely, the company could not see what Davidson was looking at on the internet. There was also no search history.

Police were alerted and went to Davidson’s home, where they seized all his internet capable devices including a Samsung mobile phone on which there were five child abuse images including three within category A.

The defendant pleaded guilty to breaching the order but denied making an indecent image of a child between 25th February 2018 and 1st June 2021. However, he was found guilty by the jury at the city’s crown court and sent to Portsmouth for sentencing.

In defence, barrister Nicholas Gammon said his client had claimed he had used the software to look for old emails and did not know how the indecent images “got there.”

The defendant cares for his partner, added Mr Gammon, who is “seriously ill” and “would not be able to cope” if he was jailed.

Mr Gammon continued: “The police are not going to leave him alone; they will monitor him very closely and he is not someone who can escape the net. My advice to him was to throw his computer away.”

Sentencing the defendant, Judge Newton-Price KC said he agreed with the barrister, adding: “You are extremely lucky to escape an immediate custodial sentence and might want to consider Mr Gammon’s suggestion to get of rid all internet devices.”

Davidson was sentenced to a total of 14 months in prison suspended for two years. He was given a 10-year SHPO and ordered to do 150 hours of unpaid work.