This guy ought to be in jail, throw away the key.
:fmad:
A SENIOR Victorian justice department official has walked free on a suspended jail sentence after pleading guilty to child porn charges, some involving internet images of children as young as six-months-old.
Forty-five-year-old James Patrick Allan, a finance officer in the Department of Justice, was convicted in the Broadmeadows Magistrates Court on three charges of possessing child pornography and one charge of making child pornography.
It was the first time under Victorian law a person who has downloaded and stored illegal material from the internet was convicted of making child pornography.
Child welfare groups immediately attacked the leniency of the sentence, calling on the judiciary to take child abuse more seriously.
Tipped off by three teenage female burglars, police raided Allan's Sunbury home in May last year where they found more than 1600 images stored on computer and discs.
The majority of the images showed pre-pubescent children from Asia, South America and Eastern Europe - many of them between six months and four-years-old - in sexual acts.
Sentencing Allan, Magistrate Alan Spillane said the usual sentence for "such loathsome, repugnant practices" should be imprisonment.
But Justice Spillane said there were mitigating circumstances for Allan, including the loss of his public service career, his public humiliation and his guilty plea.
Allan had not directly "damaged" any young children, but noted that many of the images were of third-world children.
"If it wasn't for people like you who wallow in such perversions as these, children in the third world would be less likely to be so grossly abused," Justice Spillane said.
The six-month jail sentence suspended for 18 months handed down by Justice Spillane drew criticism from child welfare advocates who urged the courts to get tougher on child porn users.
Bernadette McMenamin, national director of End Child Prostitution, Pornography and Trafficking, said child porn viewers were "fully implicated" in child abuse as demand for internet images increased.
"What it is leading to are these industries in countries like Russia and Indonesia and in South America where children are being sexually abused to feed the (demand for) images in the first world," Ms McMenamin said.
In a separate case, Victorian Chief Magistrate Ian Gray is to sentence another public servant who browsed child porn internet sites on his office computer.
The Melbourne Magistrates Court was told 44-year-old Greville Charles Ryder, an administrative assistant in the Department of Education, Employment and Training, was caught in June last year during a random audit of employees' internet use.
Ryder later told police he would log on to the child porn sites late in the afternoon when everyone had gone home and he would often masturbate while viewing the images.
He told police he knew what he was doing was wrong, but he was experiencing personal problems with his wife and stress at work and his compulsion to view the child porn was "like a sickness", the court heard.
Ryder, of Footscray, pleaded guilty to one charge of possessing child pornography.
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