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England: A former adviser to the Bishop of Oxford has pleaded guilty to posessing and making child pornography, though he insists the material found its way onto his computer by accident.
The pictures were found by detectives from the Hi-Tech Crime Unit, who raided his home in June last year. Most had been downloaded on the same day in June.
The unit had been tipped off by the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation, which discovered [The Rev Richard Thomas] Thomas's IP address - the unique address allocated to every machine connected to the internet - among a list of those using a chat page to download pornography.
Thomas, the former director of communication for the Oxford diocese, has previously pleaded not guilty to 17 charges of making indecent photographs and three of possession but yesterday at Oxford crown court he changed his plea to guilty to 10 counts of making child pornography and two of possessing it.
The remaining seven charges of making the indecent photographs and one of possessing them will lie on the file.
Thomas said afterwards that he had developed an addiction to adult pornography and the child images had been downloadedinadvertently.
He said that since experts had been unable to prove either way whether the images had been deliberately downloaded, it was theresponsiblething to do to plead guilty.
Thomas' name might be familiar to some Prattle readers, as part of his job involves liaison with minority faiths, including speaking at a Pagan Federation event. This role has generated some controversy and suspicion about his motives, some suggesting that evangelism is the sole reason he would act in a friendly manner towards such people. This was before the Church of England thought of bribing people to come to church instead. To his credit, he has not suggested in his defence that he thought that Neopagans abused children and that he was researching the matter.
Bishop's ex-adviser faces jail after downloading child images—The Guardian, 9th September 2006.
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Comments
1: Posted by: Val | September 21, 2006 6:36 PM
I've been told that the porn arrived on his computer in the form of an email attachment which he unwisely opened. It was during a time when he was evangelising on a gay chat board. Sometime after that, the police knocked on his door.
If that's the case, quite why he pleaded guilty I'm not sure, unless it was out of some wrong-headed sense of Christian forgiveness/martyrdom.
2: Posted by: Feòrag | September 21, 2006 9:41 PM
The guilty plea is really odd, because people have used similar defences -- it was a virus/pop-up/spam/nothing I did deliberately -- and been found not guilty in UK courts.
Of course, if he was evangelising on gay sites, then schadenfreude cuts in very quickly.
3: Posted by: Andrew Chalmers | October 31, 2006 1:05 PM
At the trial yesterday, the Judge said that what Richard had done was "a million miles" (his phrase) from the source of the material on his computer and from harm to children. The judge also paid tribute to the fact that when Richard realised he had illegal material on his computer he destroyed it.
The BBC describes the downloading of illegal material as "inadvertent".
The trial also made clear why Richard had pleaded guilty: he accepted that he should not have allowed this material to be there, and took responsibility for his actions.
To comment without showing any awareness of what the judge said seems ill advised.
As for 'evangelising' homosexuals, that is simply a myth. Richard is a founder member of 'Inclusive Church', a movement that campaigns for equal rights for gay people in the Church
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