Bourne man given community order for downloading indecent images of children while looking for adult pornography

A man downloaded thousands of indecent images of children while looking for adult pornography, Lincoln Crown Court was told.

Renzo Passadore used a peer to peer file sharing programme to access legal material but the programme also put the illegal images on to his computer.

Tom Heath, prosecuting, said that Lincolnshire Police received information that the computer was accessing indecent images of children and went to Passadore's home in Bourne where they seized computer equipment.

When the equipment was examined officers found just over 57,000 indecent images of children together with 32 videos. The vast majority of the material was in the least serious category.

Mr Heath said: "A detailed investigation was carried out by a technical analyst.

"It appears that Mr Passadore had utilised a peer to peer file sharing programme.

"He said he would use the programme to download adult pornography and Italian language films.

"The analysis showed that no more than one still image and 12 videos remained accessible to the user without the use of specialist software which Mr Passadore did not have. The vast majority of the files had been deleted by the user of the laptop.

"The 30 most used search terms were not considered to be common search terms for someone looking for images of this type."

Passadore, 65, of Meadow Close, Bourne, admitted three charges of making an indecent image of a child. He was given a 12 month community order with 200 hours of unpaid work.

Judge Simon Hirst told him: "The forensic examination of your computer has made it perfectly clear that you did not seek out indecent images of children and all but a handful had been deleted.

"The criminality in this case is that the defendant was searching for lawful material and during the course of search for lawful material indecent images of children were downloaded which he deleted.

"There is nothing to suggest an interest in children of an improper type."

Frances Pencheon, for Passadore, said he was a man of previous good character who had not intentionally sought out indecent images of children.

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