Jail for repeat offender

A 33-year-old repeat offender was jailed for 18 months today for distributing child sexual abuse images.

William John George, unemployed, of Port Chalmers pleaded guilty to 10 charges of distributing an objectionable publication and was sentenced in the Dunedin District Court by Judge Paul Kellar.

The Department of Internal Affairs said George was warned in 1997 and convicted in 2001 for trading objectionable material. In June 2006 an Internal Affairs investigator discovered George was again making child sexual abuse material available via peer-to-peer software on the Internet. The inspector downloaded 26 files from George’s shared folder, 16 of which were objectionable.

No objectionable files were found on George’s computer because he had used a cleanup programme. But there was evidence that a shared folder had contained a significant number of image and video clip files featuring the sexual abuse of children.

Internal Affairs Deputy Secretary, Keith Manch, says the case shows that the Department can overcome the most sophisticated attempts to conceal offending.