Jail counter-productive for child pornographer, says judge

A judge has kept a 24-year-old child abuse pornography offender out of prison after learning of his struggles with Asperger’s syndrome.

Instead, Vincenzo Tyrone Wiremu will be under intensive supervision for two years, with no access to the internet – where he had traded images on the ‘‘dark web’’ for years.

Christchurch District Court Judge Jane Farish described the images as ‘‘gross’’ when she sentenced the Rolleston truck driver on Wednesday.

The images ranged from toddlers to prepubescent boys and girls, sometimes posing or being subjected to sexual abuse including when gagged, tied or restrained.

Wiremu admitted 41 charges of making, possessing or distributing objectionable material.

His offending was identified through a United States connection in April 2016.

Wiremu admitted using a ‘‘drop box’’ system where people could access the files. He voluntarily provided access to emails and other accounts he used. That included setting up a Facebook page called ‘‘young love’’ in which to place images.

Prosecutor Marty Robinson said there was concern about the large number of people – more than 100 – who accessed the distributed material and about the extreme nature of the abuse.

Defence counsel Paul Johnson said that, after taking responsibility for the offending, Wiremu still had a significant amount of support from his family and employers, who were prepared to keep him on.

Judge Farish said the sentence she imposed was not her being ‘‘soft’’ on Wiremu, nor precedentsetting. She did not want to set a sentence that would ‘‘lose sight of rehabilitation’’.

She did not see him as a risk of causing serious harm, but he was a risk in terms of accessing computer systems. He had been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, but he had achieved relatively well and had a fulltime job where he was well regarded.

She told Wiremu: ‘‘Every image you viewed was of a person committing a crime against a young person. It caused long-term physical and mental harm. It caused ongoing anguish.’’

She had read victim impact statements from people who were abused as children for online pornography and found they ‘‘reabused’’ as adults because people continued to watch it.

Judge Farish said she accepted there was a diminished culpability because of Wiremu’s Asperger’s.

She saw a prison term as being counter-productive for Wiremu and for society. She said home detention would undermine the rehabilitative purpose of sentencing.

In what she termed an ‘‘unusual case’’, she sentenced Wiremu to two years of intensive supervision.

During this time he must accept specialist counselling, not possess internet-capable devices without approval and live at an approved address. He could not have contact with children aged under 16 without an approved adult present, until the issue was considered by the psychologist.