A 66-year-old Kaeo farmer has been jailed for three years and four months after police found more than 200,000 child porn images on his computer.
Malcolm Pritchard, who was sentenced in the District Court at Kaikohe on Friday on 10 representative charges of possessing objectionable material and 10 of possession for supply, was arrested in February last year after a police officer, using another suspect's log-on in the GigaTribe file-sharing network, was able to download 115 images from his hard drive. The images showed pre-pubescent boys nude or engaged in sex acts.
When his computer was seized police found about 227,000 images and 2300 videos, although fewer than five per cent had been viewed.
It also emerged that Pritchard had been communicating via internet chat with a man in Ireland who was in a relationship with a 12-year-old boy. Pritchard suggested the man perform a sexual act on the boy, then downloaded the images from GigaTribe. The Irishman has also been arrested.
Judge Greg Davis was anxious to quash the idea that, because the photos had already been taken and the abuse had already occurred, sharing and viewing child exploitation images was a "victimless crime". That view was "simply wrong", he said, in that it was precisely because the images were sought that the offending had occurred in the first place.
The continued viewing of those images was a re-victimisation, Judge Davis said, adding that it concerned him that many people seemed to take pleasure in viewing offences against the most vulnerable members of society.
He accepted that Pritchard had opened fewer than five per cent of the files on his computer, but that still amounted to more than 10,000 images.
There was much discussion in court about how file-sharing networks operated and whether making files available to others to download, rather than actively distributing them, amounted to supply.
Judge Davis believed it did, and that the internet era required a broader understanding of the concept of "supply".
Pritchard's lawyer, Grant Anson, said his client had not sought commercialgain, nor was there any evidence hehad supplied images to anyone else. If he had, police would have laid different charges.
"He did not disseminate those files into the wider world ... It was not like burning off a CD thousands of times and taking it to the flea market to sell," he said.
Prosecutor Todd Nicholls said Pritchard had, directly or indirectly, fed the market for such images. Encouraging the Irishman's offending was a significant aggravating feature.
He conceded, however, that the defendant had taken steps to deal with his problem, had helped police identify other offenders and was genuinely remorseful.
He had once thrown away his computer in a bid to stop his offending, but had then started again.
Judge Davis took account of Pritchard's remorse, early guilty plea and low risk of re-offending when sentencing him to imprisonment.