Prison sentence for sex pics of toddlers

Feb 5 2009 by Configuration Administrator, Birmingham Mail

A FORMER Land Rover worker who downloaded “repellent” child pornography from the internet has been jailed for 18 months.

Self-confessed paedophile John Phillips was ordered to register as a sex offender for 10 years by a judge at Birmingham Crown Court.

Phillips, 59, of Dalewood Croft, Sheldon, admitted 15 charges of making indecent images and two of possessing them.

Mr Recorder Timothy Raggatt QC said: “You have used your computer to access material on the internet to obtain, for sexual gratification, images of young female children engaged in sexual activity with adult males. The images are of children who are as young as 12 to 18 months in some instances.”

He said Phillips had a large quantity of images both still and video and one of the videos lasted for over half-an-hour and contained “repeated images of a particularly disgusting kind”.

The judge said without people like Phillips the market for such material would be dramatically diminished if not eradicated and it involved terrible harm to hapless victims.

Andrew Davidson, prosecuting, said police executed a search warrant at Phillips’ home following the sending of an email with an indecent picture.

Officers seized the computer and on the hard drive and DVDs they found a total of 152 obscene images.

When interviewed Phillips admitted finding the moving images stimulating and described himself as a paedophile.

Raglan Ashton, defending, said Phillips had been a married man but following his arrest his wife had instituted divorce proceedings and that he had been ostracised by his brothers and sisters.

He said he was a hard-working man who had been employed at Land Rover for a number of years before losing his job and that he recognised that he had a problem.