POSSESSION

August 22, 2018

To establish “possession” for the purposes of the offences of possessing indecent images of children or extreme pornographic images, the prosecution had to establish (a) that the images were within the accused’s custody or control so that he was capable of accessing them, and (b) that he had known that he possessed images. Where unsolicited images were sent to the accused by the messaging application “WhatsApp” and automatically downloaded to his phone’s memory, it was highly likely that (a) would be made out; whether (b) was made out would depend on whether he knew he had received images.

April 1, 2015

The creation of indecent pseudo images of children, by superimposing photographs of a child’s head onto photographs of naked adults in indecent poses, constituted possession, and not production, of indecent photographs of children within the sentencing guidelines. Production offences did not include those where pseudo images were made using images taken from other sources. A sentence of two years’ imprisonment imposed on an offender of previous good character was reduced to a five-month suspended sentence with a requirement to attend a sexual offences treatment programme.

December 5, 2007

In relation to a charge of possessing indecent photographs of a child, a jury had been well aware of the issues it had to assess in considering whether a defendant knew that there was a likelihood that automatic “pop-up” mechanisms or redirections to other websites on legal, albeit pornographic, websites would occur and whether if, upon accessing the legal website, the “pop-ups” would contain separate illegal images.

Contact Stephen

Please use the form below to make contact. Your email will be responded to promptly (we endeavour to respond to all email enquiries within one hour). Alternatively, you can call Stephen's firm, Twelve Tabulae Limited, on +44 (0) 141 2800504.
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.