Your porn collection could land you in jail… so for how long?
by Richard SmithsonNow, you want to know how many years in jail your collection of internet pornography is worth. Of course you do. (Your dead-wood porn is quite safe. Nobody has been prosecuted for having feelthy postcards since Pontius was a pilot; it’s all internet stuff these days.) I am here to tell you.
Sentencing criminals these days is all done by numbers. There is a body called the Sentencing Council, made up of tremendously important judges, who produce natty little booklets that tell their junior brethren and sistren what to do. This is what this article is all about.
First, though, what gets prosecuted nowadays? The answer is, almost exclusively child porn, of which there is a tsunami only slightly smaller than the internet itself. Child porn is now known as “indecent photographs of children” (or IPCs), and you can be sentenced for creating it, distributing it, or possessing it; creating is more serious than distributing, which is more serious than possessing. If you download an image onto your computer, you are technically “creating” the image, but you will be sentenced for possessing it.
There is also an offence of possessing, or creating, or distributing, “extreme pornographic images” (or EPNs). The EPNs tend to depict torture and bestiality. (Stop moaning. Nobody needs pictures of people sucking off dogs. And don’t tell me that there is an ancient Etruscan vase with a picture of Alexander the Great sucking off a hippogriff. I don’t care. And don’t get all pretentious with me and say “Oh, I suppose that Ioacchino Assereto’s The Torture of Prometheus is pornography now.” No it isn’t, and it never was – any more than Goya’s Saturn Devouring his Son is.)
Here is a useful tip: when you find yourself in the dock, plead guilty. You will get a one-third reduction in your sentence if you plead guilty at the first opportunity. If you leave it until the day of trial, when the witnesses are at court, the jury is thinking “oh goody, a porn trial”, and the judge is reaching for his bonnet noir, you will only get a 10% discount. Which, if you are going down for ten years, makes a difference.
So how do the Sentencing Guidelines work? First, the images are sorted into categories:
Note that you will not attract the attention of the police if you have a photograph of your little sister naked in the bath. You will attract the attention of the police if you have 1,750 photographs of naked children in the bath, which you have found as a result of googling “naked children in the bath.”
And the sentences are:
These are the sentences that you can expect if you plead not guilty; if you plead guilty, they will all be reduced by a third.
If the starting point is a year’s custody, with a range of six months to two years’ custody, how does the judge know where in the range to put you? It very much depends on how good his breakfast was, or how bad his haemorrhoids are, but he will look at the following factors:
Factors that make the sentence heavier include:
You have previous convictions
You committed the offence while you were on bail
You have failed to comply with current court orders
You committed the offence while you were on licence from prison
The age or vulnerability of the child depicted
Discernible pain or distress suffered by the child
The period over you possessed, distributed or produced the pictures
A high volume of images
Placing images where there is the potential for a high volume of viewers
Your collection includes moving images
You have tried to dispose of or conceal the evidence. (This cuts both ways; if you have tried to delete the lot because you have turned over a new leaf, you might get credit for this.)
Abuse of trust
The child depicted is known to you
Active involvement in a network or process that facilitates or commissions the creation or sharing of indecent images of children
Commercial exploitation or motivation
Deliberate or systematic searching for images portraying young children, category A images or the portrayal of familial sexual abuse
A large number of different victims
The child depicted seems to be intoxicated or drugged
These factors will point towards a lighter sentence:
No previous convictions or no relevant or recent convictions
Remorse
Previous good character or exemplary conduct
Age or lack of maturity where it affects the responsibility of the offender
Mental disorder or learning disability, particularly where they are linked to the commission of the offence
You can show that you have taken steps to address your offending behaviour
By the way, you will lose your computer, iPhone, carbon paper, or any other medium on which the pix were stored.
And finally, when the police come knocking at your door, and eventually find 14,000 indecent images on your computer, do the legal system a great big favour: don’t say you have no idea how they got there. At your trial, small laborious IT experts in varifocal glasses will demonstrate conclusively to the jury that the Internet Fairies do not exist, and of course you downloaded the stuff yourself. Unless you were stupid enough to give the Internet Fairies your 12-digit alphanumeric password, which you didn’t.
Start shredding.
