Garda guilty of child porn

A GARDA was yesterday found guilty of having child sex abuse images on his laptop.

Joseph O’connor, 58, from West Dublin, had pleaded not guilty to five counts of possessing explicit material at his home.

During a search gardai probing other allegations seized a laptop.

Computer experts found videos in the “recycle bin” depicting boys aged under 10 being sexually abused.

Two films involved boys under 17 being subjected to sexual acts by a man.

There were also multiple copies of 16 different images of children sexually exposed or being abused.

After just over two hours of deliberating, the jury of 10 men and two women returned unanimous verdicts of guilty on four counts.

They acquitted him of one count, which dealt with 56 duplicates of two images.

After his arrest O’connor told gardai he had never seen the material before and denied downloading it.

He said he believed a man called Patryk Farrell, who came to his home for sex days before the laptop was seized, had corrupted his computer.

Closing the State’s case lawyer Alice Fawsitt told the jury there was no evidence of any virus on the laptop or of anything that might have happened to it the weekend before it was seized.

CONVICTED

O’connor was found guilty of possessing the two originals of these images, which were found in a folder named “Spanked Boys”.

He was also convicted of having 15 explicit videos of child sex on dates between July 30 and August 2, 2011.

And he was found guilty of possessing 56 images and 42 videos of children being subjected to explicit sexual acts and 41 images of youngsters being sexually exposed.

Most of these files were found in the “unallocated cluster” space of the hard drive.

This area is where files are placed after deletion from the “recycle bin” and is inaccessible to the user without the use of specialist software.

Defence lawyer Paul Carroll said his client is a long-serving garda and has been suspended since these matters arose.

He asked for time for O’connor to be able to gather reports for Dublin Circuit Criminal Court for the sentence hearing.

Judge Elma Sheahan thanked the jury for their service and remanded the accused on continuing bail until Monday.