Child porn pensioner fined £1,000

Dec 4 2009

A PERTH pensioner, found with a stash of kiddie porn on his home computer, was fined £1,000 at the Sheriff Court this week.

Sixty-six-year-old William Ferguson, of Potterhill Gardens, also had his name added to the Sex Offenders’ Register for five years.

The court was told that police recovered thousands of indecent images of children, some as young as five, when they seized his computer equipment.

Officers removed a hard drive and tower unit, as well as CDs and DVDs, and sent them off to their Technical Support Unit for examination.

The equipment contained 1014 ‘live’ images and 1140 ‘deleted’ images, which were subsequently recovered.

“The ages of the children ranged from five to 16,” depute fiscal Janine Bates told the court.

All were Level One, the least serious of the categories used to describe the severity of child porn pictures.

The hard drive and two CDs contained a further 444 images of female adults and children.

Passing sentence on Ferguson, a first offender, Sheriff Lindsay Foulis pointed out that the images were of children being abused.

“The fact that folk, for whatever reason, are prepared to view these images – and no doubt pay some sort of money through websites – encourages the unscrupulous in the world to continue to abuse children.

“To be vulgar about it, as far as these people are concerned, there’s money to be gained from such abuse. That’s why what you did is criminal.”

The Sheriff added “If you and others did not view these sites, and accordingly did not give finance to these people, then the incentive for them to abuse children would go.

“These people are driven by financial greed and to gain finance they don’t care who they hurt or who they damage.”

Ferguson pled guilty to being in possession of indecent photographs of children at his home on February 25 this year.

Police gained a search warrant for the accused’s home after receiving confidential information that he was in possession of indecent images.

Solicitor David Holmes said that the accused’s wife was “extremely ill” and he now spent his entire time looking after her.

He had Army and old age pensions amounting to £900 a month.

Ferguson will pay the fine at the rate of £30 per fortnight.