Plett man in child porn case jailed for 15 years
THE Plettenberg Bay computer engineer who pleaded guilty to 18 644 counts of possession of child pornography will spend the next 15 years behind bars, following a landmark sentence in the Thembalethu Regional Court in George yesterday.
This is believed to be the stiffest sentence handed down for child pornography possession in South Africa and also the highest number of child pornography images involved in one case.
William Beale, 39, took his place in the dock yesterday for the final time, almost three years after his high-profile arrest.
Beale was the first South African arrested as part of Operation Cloud 9.
Handing down sentence, magistrate Eugenia Jacobs said imprisonment was the only option for Beale as anything else would have been disproportionate to the crime.
“This sentence should send a clear message to the public that these crimes are unacceptable and will not be tolerated,” she said.
“Imprisonment will deter the accused from repeating similar crimes and also deter others from committing such offences.”
She said if the court and the community did not become the voice for the voiceless, who would?
Operation Cloud 9 involved cooperation between Belgian and South African police to take down an international child pornography network linked to a cyber meeting space for paedophiles whose fetishes included the sexual abuse of babies.
Following Beale’s arrest during a sting operation in January 2015, police discovered thousands of images and videos of children being tortured, raped and even murdered on his computer. Some of the children were only a few days old. He was initially charged with just short of 180 000 counts of possession of child pornography, but du-
ring a plea agreement in February this year, he pleaded guilty to 18 644.
Jacobs said that in the past the courts had dealt with these crimes relatively lightly but this was changing.
She said there were several aggravating factors considered as part of sentencing, including that Beale’s crimes fuelled the child porn industry and that reoffending was a possibility.
Lieutenant-Colonel Heila Niemand from the Gauteng family violence and sexual offences unit, who led the investigation in South Africa, said she was thrilled with the sentence.
“This sends out a message to South Africa and the world that we, the police, the justice department and NGOs will not tolerate these crimes,” Niemand said.
Both Niemand and Women and Men Against Child Abuse director Miranda JordanFriedmann confirmed that this was the stiffest sentence to have been handed down for possession of child pornography in South Africa.
“We are so pleased the magistrate mentioned that possession of these images was not a victimless crime,” Jordan-Friedmann said.
“Whether you are directly involved in creating the images or indirectly viewing them, for each image a child had to endure sexual abuse.”
Beale was also sentenced to a R500 fine, or 30 days in prison, for possession of dagga – found during his arrest in 2015.