A 68-year-old Dubbo man has been sentenced to three years and four months in prison for possessing more than 17,000 pornographic images of children.
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Police found the images on computers belonging to the accused, Reginald Condon.
He had accessed them from shared file systems, a Dubbo court heard yesterday.
The children depicted in the photographs were estimated to be between the age of 12 and 13, but the number of children involved was not disclosed.
Some of the images were described as classification five and six on the “Copine scale”.
Classification five includes “erotic” and “deliberate” posing, naked, semi-clothed or fully clothed.
Classification six includes “explicit [or] erotic” poses focussing on genital areas, the court heard.
Condon was sentenced in Dubbo Local Court yesterday after pleading guilty to the second charge, which comprised of possessing in excess of 15,000 images.
He pleaded guilty to the first charge, which related to more than 2000 images, in October.
Police attended Condon’s West Dubbo home on February 19 for unrelated matters and seized his computer which contained some 2,500 pornographic images of children.
They returned on June 18 and found two more computers that were not there the first time.
Those computers possessed the 15,000-plus images.
“If you had any remorse or contrition, sequence two simply would not be before the court,” Magistrate Howard Hamilton said.
A pre-sentence report indicated Condon had minimised his behaviour and was more concerned with being charged, Magistrate Hamilton told the court.
In relation to the victims, Condon said, “if they looked happy then I did not consider it to be wrong”, according to the author of the pre-sentence report.
The court heard Condon had convictions in the past of indecently assaulting girls under the age of 16 and sexual intercourse with a girl under the age of 16.
“When one looks at the number of images [which is] in excess of 17,000, as a matter of logic... it is clear there is a vast number of children involved”, Magistrate Hamilton said.
Condon had already spent 93 days in custody after his arrest in June this year because he could not meet the conditions of his bail.
He was sentenced to 20 months in prison with a non-parole period of 15 months.
Because of the days spent in custody already, Magistrate Hamilton backdated that jail term to September 18 this year.
He was sentenced to another term of 20 months with a non-parole period of 15 months for the second count, to begin on December 18 next year.