Garda faces Christmas in jail over child abuse images on computer
Officer blamed man who came to his home for sex
Videos depicted boys under 10 He claimed a man corrupted laptop
A JURY yesterday convicted a garda of downloading photos and videos of children being raped by adults.
Some of the images were labelled ‘pedo’ and showed sex between men and young boys while one folder was marked ‘Spanked Boys’ and contained images of child abuse.
Joseph O’Connor, 58, from west Dublin, had pleaded not guilty at the city’s Circuit Criminal Court to five counts of having child pornography at his home between July 30 and August 2, 2011.
The trial heard gardaí investigating other allegations seized a laptop during a search of his home. An analysis found videos in the computer’s ‘recycle bin’ depicting boys under the age of ten being subjected to sexual acts.
Two videos depicted boys under 17 being subjected to sexual acts with a male adult. There were also multiple copies of 16 different images of children sexually exposed or being subjected to sexual acts.
After a little over two hours, the jury of ten men and two women returned unanimous verdicts of guilty on four counts. The jury found him guilty of possessing two images that were found in a folder named ‘Spanked Boys’. He was also convicted of possessing 15 explicit videos of child sex.
Finally he was convicted of possessing 56 images and 42 videos of children being subjected to explicit sexual acts and 41 images of children being sexually exposed. Most of these files were in the ‘unallocated cluster’ of the hard drive. This area is where files are placed after deletion from the ‘recycle bin’ and is inaccessible without specialist software.
O’Connor was acquitted on one count which dealt with duplicates of two images.
Defence counsel Paul Carroll said O’Connor was a long-serving garda and had been suspended when these matters arose. He asked for time for his client to gather reports for the sentence hearing as he faces the possibility of Christmas behind bars. Judge Elma Sheahan remanded him on continuing bail until Monday.
After his arrest O’Connor told gardaí he had never seen the material before and denied downloading it. He claimed that a man, Patryk Farrell, who came to his home for sex, days before the laptop was seized, had corrupted his computer.
Closing the State’s case Alice Fawsitt told the jury there was no evidence of any virus on the laptop and no evidence of anything that might have happened to it days before it was seized.
Mr Carroll said O’Connor told gardaí that hundreds of men had come back to his home for sex and that any of them could freely use his laptop.
He told the trial that on the day after they met for sex at O’Connor’s home, Mr Farrell texted O’Connor and told him he was bruised and that he was going to gardaí and would ‘destroy’ him. O’Connor went to gardaí to report that Mr Farrell had stolen his Garda ID, handcuffs and cash from his home. Counsel asked if it was reasonable that his client knew Mr Farrell had made allegations to gardaí and didn’t destroy his laptop knowing there was illegal material on it.
During legal argument in the absence of the jury, the court heard gardaí went to O’Connor’s home to investigate allegations of assault by Mr Farrell.
They seized the laptop in connection with this investigation and subsequently found the illegal images. The jury were told that Mr Farrell’s claims were also forwarded to the Ombudsman but Mr Farrell did not co-operate with this inquiry and it was dropped.
The jury also learned that an investigation by Inspector Colm Fox, since deceased, concluded there was no basis for the allegations of false imprisonment, rape or sexual assault which he said were consequences of sexual acts. The trial heard Mr Farrell is also since deceased.