Jail on hold to fix ‘deviant behaviour’

A MAN found with almost five hours of child abuse videos – including the rape of girls as young as eight – has been told by a judge that most people would “regard him with complete contempt”.

But the judge said sending Tiago Kaminski-luiz to prison for a relatively short time would not address the underlying causes of his “deviant behaviour”.

Swansea Crown Court heard police executed a search warrant under the Protection of Children Act at Kaminski-luiz’s house in Bryn Road, Brynmill, Swansea, in the early hours of March 8.

Ashanti-jade Walton, prosecuting, said officers seized a one terabyte computer hard-drive from the property, and in the device’s recycle bin they found a total of nine indecent films – seven classified as Category A, containing the most extreme kind of abuse, and two of category C.

In total the films ran to more than four hours and 51 minutes in length, and featured scenes including girls as young as eight being tied up and raped by adult men, as well as children aged between four and six being abused.

Examination of the drive showed the films had been deleted in 2015.

Officers also found six prohibited films – that is films of not of real people but of cartoon or computer generated images – which dated from June 2017 and February 2018. These films showed images of girls under 18 in sexual activity.

In his subsequent police interview 31-year-old defendant claimed to have gone through a “very, very strong depression” and to have taken drugs which resulted in “some missing time in my memory”.

He told officers that when he “woke up” from the drugs, he found a folder on his desk top computer with the files in.

Kaminski-luiz, now of Drayton Road, Willesden, London, had previously pleaded guilty to two counts of making indecent images, and one count of possessing prohibited images when he appeared in the dock for sentencing.

Sarah Allen, for Kaminski-luiz, said her client was someone who had “hit the self-destruct button” in his life, and went through periods of “taking an enormous quantity of drugs” to get by day-today.

She said there was a “darkness within him” which is exacerbated by taking controlled drugs, especially the cannabis and “an awful lot of mephadrone”.

The barrister said Kaminski-luiz had referred himself to the Lucy Faithful Foundation – a charity which works to tackle child sex abuse – and that sending the defendant to prison for the relatively short time the sentencing guidelines allowed for would serve little purpose as he would be unable to access the help that was available in custody to inmates on longer sentences.

Judge William Gaskell told Kaminski-luiz there was no doubt he had intentionally downloaded the films, and he described the defendant’s assertions in the pre-sentence report that he hadn’t known what he was doing as “wholly unconvincing”.

He said: “You were looking at images of children who had been, and were being, sexually abused for the pleasure of people like you.

“Many people would regard you with complete contempt.”

The judge said the case clearly crossed the custody threshold, and that the guidelines suggested a starting point for sentencing of 12 months – with a one-third credit for a guilty plea that would be reduced to eight months, meaning the defendant would actually serve four months in custody before being released.

Judge Gaskell said with a sentence of that length there would be no possibility of Kaminski-luiz receiving treatment for his “deviant behaviour”.

Kaminski-luiz was sentenced to six months in prison suspended for two years, was made the subject of a nightly curfew at his London address for the next three months, and was ordered to complete a rehabilitation course and the Horizon community sex offenders programme.

He was also made the subject of sexual harm prevention order to control his access to the internet, and will be on the sex offenders register the next seven years.