A pervert hid a phone from police and was downloading horrific images of vulnerable children being subjected to sexual abuse. Damien Garford had already been caught downloading pictures of children being abused and had been handed a community order by Oxford Crown Court on June 16, 2010.
Part of his punishment was a sexual offences prevention order, where public protection officers must be allowed unrestricted access to inspect any equipment he owns or uses capable of connecting to the internet. But Garford hid a mobile phone and accessed it on at least four dates, breaching the order, as using a laptop.
Police executed a search warrant when they realised he had looked at indecent images. Judge Gregory Dickinson QC, the Recorder of Nottingham, said it was not some technical breach of failing to notify the relevant authorities he had use of a device that had access to the internet.
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"This was a device you were using to search for indecent images of children and you kept that hidden from the police", he said. Garford, 43, of Lord Nelson Street, Sneinton, was using pseudonyms online and searching on the phone for images of children.
He downloaded 75 Category A images - the worst level of pictures - and then 18 Category B images and 280 at Category C, the least serious level. Garford previously breached the same sexual harm order in 2015 when he failed to reveal to police he was using two mobile phones.
Garford pleaded guilty to the most recent breach of the order, failing to comply with the notification requirements, and possessing all three categories of images, and was jailed for 12 months, and placed on a sexual harm prevention order for ten years.
Judge Dickinson told Garford he had downloaded 75 images of children in Category A - that means penetrative abuse of children. "The example given in a statement is oral rape of a child aged seven or eight years", he told him in the dock.
Andrew Wesley, mitigating on Wednesday, June 1, said Garford had chosen to revert to the 2010 behaviour "with all the risks that went with it."
