Five years in prison for ‘haunting’ images

A P.E.I. man convicted of his fourth child pornography charge has been sentenced to five years in prison.

Clay James Meron, 48, appeared before Chief Judge Nancy Orr in provincial court in Charlottetown on Tuesday where she sentenced him for distributing child pornography.

Before sentencing Meron, Orr talked about the difficulty of a judge having to look at child pornography. “Those images are haunting,” she said.

Meron pleaded guilty to uploading an image of child pornography to a website called ChatStep where he went by the name “uberperv.” ChatStep contacted authorities about the image and the police determined it came from Meron’s mother’s address, which was where he lived at the time.

Meron initially denied uploading child pornography, but a search of devices in the home found 11 images.

The police seized 19 devices that were encrypted. Meron refused to give passwords for the devices. Meron also had a phone with more than 80 images of young girls that were not child pornography, but were taken outdoors in the Cornwall and Meadowbank area. Although Orr said the images in Meron’s case weren’t in the higher end of “depravity,” she did talk about the worst child pornography where victims have a “hollow look as if they’re just a shell.”

Once he is released from prison, Meron will be on the national sex offender registry for life and will have other restrictions, including no communication with anyone under 16 unless he is supervised.

Orr ordered the forfeiture of numerous hard drives, cellphones, USB drives, computers and CDs the police seized.