R v Chaplin

[2012] NSWDC 301

District Court

New South Wales

Medium Neutral Citation:	R v Chaplin [2012] NSWDC 301
Hearing dates:	13 June 2012
Decision date:	13 June 2012
Before:	Berman SC DCJ
Decision:	On each count the offender is sentenced to imprisonment, consisting of a non-parole period of 18 months and head sentence of 3 years.
Catchwords:	CRIMINAL LAW -Sentence - Possess child abuse material
Category:	Sentence
Parties:	The Crown Christian Richard Chaplin
Representation:	Mr P Marr Director of Public Prosecutions Woodgate Mrogan - Offender
File Number(s):	2011/241555

SENTENCE

1. HIS HONOUR: Christian Richard Chaplin was working for a company involved in industrial water treatment. He regularly worked from home. He was given a company laptop computer in order to assist him. Unbeknownst to his employer, he used that computer to access child pornography. He backed up the images and videos that he viewed onto CDs. When he resigned from the company he returned the laptop and accidentally returned some of the CDs. That was on 15 April 2011.

1. One of the owners of the company looked at the laptop and the CDs that Mr Chaplin had returned. He saw child pornography on one of the CDs. Shocked as he was, he apparently was not terribly clear what he should do. The directors of the company discussed the material. The offender was contacted and he said that the material had been given to him by a friend. Eventually, the owners of the company reported the matter to police. They then went to the offender's premises and searched them. They found a number of further CDs containing child pornography. The offender also told them that there was a hard drive containing child pornographic images on it, but when that was later examined it was shown that that was not the case.

1. The offender now stands to be sentenced for two offences of possessing child abuse material. One of those charges relates to the material handed in to his former employer on 15 April and the other relates to the material found on the CDs by police when they searched his home on 21 July.

1. Consistent with what I understand to be good practice, the prosecution has not perpetuated the harm that has been caused to the children involved in the production of this child abuse material by further publishing that material, in particular by tendering the images to me. However, what is conceded to be an accurate summary of a large number of CDs was tendered to me. There were 25 discs examined and in excess of 80,000 child abuse images and videos were discovered.

1. A sample of each disc was viewed and categorised, according to the Child Exploitation Tracking Scheme Scale. It is important to remember that the scale is a bit deceptive because whilst categories 1 to 5 involve increasing heinousness of images and videos, category 6 is an entirely different category involving drawings and cartoons of children. In other words, category 6 is not worse than category 5. With that in mind, it is clear that the offender possessed child abuse material covering all categories, including images and videos that indicated sadism or bestiality, and which included sexual imagery involving pain, humiliation or animals. There were other images and videos showing penetrative sexual activity involving children including intercourse, cunnilingus and fellatio.

1. In contrast to some of the other cases that have come before the courts, the children depicted appear to be to be no younger than six, but they were certainly under the age of 16 and in the age group of six to 13 years, according to the facts tendered to me.

1. The seriousness of such conduct is obvious. The courts have set out repeatedly why it is that offences of this kind cause such harm. Primarily of course, and most directly, there is the harm involved in the children who are depicted in the videos and images. In order for someone to photograph or video a child being sexually abused, a child has to be sexually abused. How it is that the offender could view this material and not have feelings of empathy towards the innocent children involved is difficult to understand.

1. But the harm involved in offences of this type, goes beyond that caused to those children directly involved in the production of material. There is, as was reported in this case, a process of desensitisation and it is not drawing a long bow at all to suggest that possession and production of child abuse material leads, in a more indirect way, to children being sexually abused, either by the person who has viewed the material or in other ways, as the abuse of children becomes more commonplace.

1. The offender had a background which provides no clues as to why he would offend in this way. He was raised in Wales, came to Australia with his mother at a relatively young age and has been successful in his life. He has been an industrious worker and is regarded as an upstanding member of the community. He has been married for ten years and has three children to his wife. He has told many people who know him about what he has done. Despite that, it appears that his friends and family have stood by him. References attesting to his good character were tendered today and almost invariably they referred to the circumstance that the offender retained their support, despite the referees knowing the details of what he had done.

1. The offender co-operated with the police when his premises were searched and that co-operation continued. He pleaded guilty at the Local Court and was committed for sentence. He was arraigned on an indictment today because of a defect in the committal document, but his early plea of guilty is to be rewarded with a discount of 25 per cent to reflect the utilitarian value of his plea.

1. His co-operation with the police and his early pleas of guilty are also consistent with the offender expressing remorse. I accept that he is remorseful and I accept that he has difficulty, himself, understanding how it is that he came to view this enormous number of videos and images.

1. It is suggested that the offender became exposed to pornography when he was working at a service station which sold pornographic material. One thing the internet has clearly done is allowed people with an interest in pornography to access such material. It has also allowed those who wish to view child abuse material to access that as well.

1. There is little to explain why it would be that the offender's interests would change from viewing adult pornography, such as he saw in the service station, to child pornography such that he accessed over the internet. There is no suggestion that he has acted out on and sexually assaulted any children in any way and yet his actions, in viewing this material, he says perhaps out of boredom, are concerning in the extreme.

1. I repeat, it is difficult to understand how anyone could get any form of pleasure, even overcome his boredom, through viewing material which clearly harmed the children involved in its production.

1. The maximum penalty for each of these offences is ten years. It is well known that followed an increase in penalties some years ago. That increase reflects the attitude of the legislature to offences of this kind and it is important that courts give effect to the expression of Parliament's intention.

1. It is clear that the offender must go to gaol. He gave evidence that he had prepared his children for this by telling them that he was going to working in Western Australia and would not be home for some time. Nothing less than a full-time custodial sentence is appropriate to reflect the objective gravity of what the offender did.

1. The offender is unlikely to re-offend, at least in part because of the sentence I will soon be imposing. He thus has good prospects for rehabilitation and is working at present with psychologists who are seeking to assist him.

1. I want to refer to something that appeared in the letter to the court from the offender's wife. She accurately suggested that their children would be harmed by the offender being sent to gaol. It is, unfortunately a commonplace occurrence, that parents of children go to gaol and thereby the suffer. I acknowledge that impact upon the children of the offender and his wife. But of course, that letter did not take account of the wider need to protect other children, other innocent children, including those involved in the production of the offending material. It is important that they are protected. They are as innocent as the children of the offender.

1. The crown suggested that I should partially accumulate. I am not going to do that for this reason. The number of charges faced by a person to be sentenced for possessing child pornography is almost an accident of the way the material is stored. These discs all came from the one source and the two charges simply relate to the time at which the offender was found to be in possession of that material. In my view, the one concurrent sentence will adequately cover the criminality of what the offender did. There are clearly special circumstances in this case, a matter conceded by the crown.

1. On each count the offender is sentenced to imprisonment. I set a non-parole period of 18 months and a head sentence of three years. That sentence is to date from today, 13 June 2012. The non-parole period will expire on 12 December 2013, on which day the offender is to be released to parole.

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Decision last updated: 03 December 2013