Man sentenced to 20 months for child porn
Convicted had shared 'profoundly disturbing images' on Internet
Evan Kiyoshi French
Northern News Services
Monday, March 21, 2016
DENINU KU'E/FORT RESOLUTION
A Fort Resolution man caught sharing child pornography on the Internet has been sentenced to 20 months in jail.
Fifty-one-year-old Joseph King pleaded guilty to possessing and distributing child pornography after being swept up in a multi-provincial and territorial RCMP investigation in 2012 dubbed Operation Snapshot.
Investigators discovered an IP address linked to a computer in Fort Resolution which was sharing child porn with other Internet users. Police tracked the IP address to King's home and executed a search warrant on Oct. 9, 2012. Nobody was home when officers arrived but they soon located a laptop computer, loose hard drives and floppy disks. King returned shortly afterwards with a thumb drive hanging from a lanyard around his neck.
King tried to enter the home but police blocked his path. They seized the thumb drive and added it to the pile of seized hardware.
"The bottom line is 68 videos (featuring child pornography) were on the thumb drive and 35 still photographs," NWT Supreme Court judge Louise Charbonneau told court March 16, adding seven documents were found containing written descriptions of sex acts between children and adult men.
She said two files from the thumb drive were shared with users online.
As for what was depicted in the material, Charbonneau said it was "profoundly disturbing."
RCMP members reviewed all of the seized material and wrote up a list of the sex acts portrayed. The photographs depicted prepubescent private parts and images involving post-pubescent males and the written material on the floppy disks was equally disturbing, said Charbonneau.
"The title of one of the stories was 'The Torturing Death of (name omitted),'" she said.
Charbonneau said she took King's troubled history into account in deciding his sentence. When he was four-years old, King was diagnosed as mentally disabled and sent to a hospital in Edmonton.
He was restrained day and night and had limited access to his family.
"It's difficult to imagine," she said.
When he returned to Fort Resolution and began attending school, it became clear the diagnosis was not accurate. At age 16, King tried alcohol for the first time and was a regular-weekend binge drinker by the time he was 30.
"He drinks on the weekends to the point of blacking out," Charbonneau told the court. "He has limited financial means and can't access specialized counselling."
Charbonneau called the state of King's home when it was raided in 2012 an example of the vulnerable lifestyle he was living. Upon entering the home, police had to wear special respirators while they worked because the place was such a mess.
"His house was in chaos," the judge said. "The fact that he lived in such conditions is quite indicative."
King sat motionless at the defence table with his lawyer Peter Harte as the judge spoke and declined to speak when she asked if he had anything to say before sentencing.
Charbonneau credited King with four months of time served in pre-trial custody and ordered him to serve three years of probation upon his release, the longest period of probation a judge can order. The judge said, with her sentence to King, she aims to send a message to other would-be offenders that the consequences would be severe, adding there is obviously a market for this kind of material.
She said King does not have a criminal record but that is not a mitigating factor in a child pornography case.
"It's a vicious cycle. This is far from a victimless crime," said Charbonneau.
King forfeits the equipment seized during the raid and will be required to provide a DNA sample. He will be registered as a sex offender for life and faces three conditions on his probation order related to children upon his release, namely that he be prohibited from going to public parks or areas where people under the age of 16 are present in large numbers, must abstain from employment or volunteer work where he would have authority over people under the age of 16, and must abstain from viewing pornography of any kind, be it on the Internet or otherwise.
Charbonneau left it to the correctional system to decide where to imprison him but added she wants justice department staff to consult with King to figure out which facility will suit him best and ensure he has access to counselling.
"I hope you're able to get the help you need, Mr. King," she said.
