Rural man sentenced to 5 1/2 years for child porn

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This article was published 10/04/2024 (806 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A man from rural Westman who pleaded guilty to making child pornography, including using images of his 13-year-old stepdaughter, will spend five-and-a-half years behind bars, a provincial court judge decided Tuesday afternoon.

The 36-year-old man, who cannot be named due to a publication ban intended to protect the victims, previously pleaded guilty to charges of making child pornography, possessing child pornography and distributing child pornography.

Associate Chief Judge Donovan Dvorak took time to decide on the sentence after first hearing the sentencing submissions last December. At that time, the Crown asked that the man be sentenced to seven years in prison, while the man’s defence lawyer argued for a four-year sentence.

Police arrested the man in July 2022 after they were informed that two images of child pornography had been shared between users. Officers traced the IP address to a location in a rural Westman community.

At the time of his arrest, the man told police that he had been accessing child pornography for about 10 years. A police search of the man’s electronic devices revealed 4,177 files of child pornography, and 2,849 of those images had been created by the man using Photoshop.

While the photos were shown to the judge, a police officer provided a description of the photos at the hearing. The photos consisted of the man exposing himself while his stepdaughter can be seen in the background in the same room, photos of his stepdaughter in her underwear and photos of her superimposed onto existing child porn images.

“The most disturbing aspect of this case … is that the accused’s thoroughly pedophilic mindset extended to his own stepdaughter, 13 at the time,” Crown attorney Rich Lonstrup had said at the hearing.

When delivering his decision on Tuesday, the judge said that determining a sentence involves consideration of both the circumstances of the offences and the offender.

“In the present case, (the accused) went beyond accessing and distributing child pornography — he created it,” Dvorak said. “He was in a position of trust over his partner’s young daughter. He abused that trust by creating images in which her likeness was made to be child pornography.”

The judge added that the man had become addicted to pornography at a young age, first by viewing his father’s pornographic magazines as a pre-teen. By age 16 he was viewing pornography daily and then by his mid-20s he was viewing child pornography. When things were going well in his life, he would feel less of a need to access the child pornography, the judge said. The 36-year-old has no prior criminal record.

Dvorak said the number of images and the content of them would put the man at a higher range of a prison sentence for the charge of possession of child pornography, while only sharing two images on Snapchat, which were not the images of the stepdaughter, would put him at the lower sentence end for the charge of distributing child pornography.

When referring to the charge of making child pornography, the judge called the case an “unusual set of circumstances” because the man did not sexually abuse any children while making the pornography, as he was superimposing images onto existing pornographic images.

However, the judge said that by using these existing images, he was perpetuating the abuse suffered by another child, and that by using images of his stepdaughter, he psychologically harmed that child and the girl’s mother, who was the man’s partner at the time.

“While there is no evidence that (the accused) physically harmed the child, there’s no doubt that the emotional and psychological harm suffered by the child due to his egregious breach of trust will be lifelong,” Dvorak said.

Ultimately, the judge sentenced the man to five-and-a-half years behind bars, along with a 20-year order to remain on the national sex offender registry and orders to not have contact with his stepdaughter and the child’s mother. The man, who had been on bail until his sentencing on Tuesday, was escorted out of the courtroom by sheriffs.

Dvorak also ordered that the pornographic images that had been filed as exhibits in the sentence hearing be destroyed after the timeframe for a sentence appeal had expired.

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