Psychiatric check for porn offender

David Gerard Hide admitted 12 charges. Picture / Alan Gibson

A judge has ordered a psychological report on a Te Puke man who altered images of naked girls to make them more sexually explicit and claimed he did not know such images were illegal.

Name suppression lapsed yesterday for electrical contractor David Gerard Hide, 49, when he pleaded guilty to 12 charges relating to images of nude children as young as 8 found on his computer.

Two pictures, of girls aged 10 and 12, had been digitally altered with pornographic imagery from other sources.

The Tauranga District Court heard that Hide thought most of the images, which he downloaded from an internet site, were not objectionable and that pictures of nude children were legal.

Judge Peter Rollo convicted him on 10 charges of possessing objectionable material and two of making objectionable material, ordering a psychological report before sentencing next month.

Hide was arrested after a friend found the images when he borrowed his computer and contacted police.

Detectives from Te Puke obtained a search warrant and seized Hide's computer from his house on May 20.

Hide was not at home, but was interviewed five days later in Gisborne by a censorship compliance inspector from the Department of Internal Affairs.

Duncan McWilliam, representing the department, said Hide told the inspector he downloaded the images from a pay site.

"He said that he knew very little about internet censorship laws, that he understood that sexually explicit pictures of children were not allowed by law, but that he thought that pictures of nude children were allowed," Mr McWilliam said.

Hide had also told the inspector that the only pictures he thought might be objectionable were those on the computer that he had changed "for his own self-gratification".

Hide was reinterviewed on June 11, when he admitted using software to alter the two pictures.

He faces five years in prison or a $5000 fine for the possession charges, and 10 years in prison for making objectionable material.

His lawyer, Matthew Goodwin, said Hide's offending warranted only a high level of fines and community supervision.

Hide was remanded on bail. Orders were sought for forfeiture of his computer and destruction of the images.