A FORMER IT technician wept in the dock after escaping a prison sentence for possessing thousands of child pornography images – his second conviction in ten years.
Unemployed Michael Gilmore, 42, who recently moved from Hill Road, Chelmsford, to Felix Road, Ipswich, pleaded guilty to ten charges of downloading and possessing indecent photographs or pseudo-photographs of children, including one picture and a video both simulating sex with a corpse.
At Chelmsford Crown Court on Monday, Judge David Turner said: "The court is faced with an impossible dilemma – on the one hand a defendant who re-offends in this way deserves to go to prison, and if that previous offending had been more recent than 10 years ago you would be going to prison today.
"But that is not the course of action I'm going to take. I intend to extend a measure of mercy to protect you and the public from further harm so that you can get some help in the long-term interest of all concerned.
"This is a shameful day for you and these images are of a dreadful nature. I accept you developed a morbid interest in these images.
"But this is not a victimless crime – to make these images little children as young as four and five are forced into makeshift studios and exploited for profit."
Two counts of distributing indecent images were left to lie on file as part of a negotiation for Gilmore's early guilty plea.
In May, he admitted to having a total of 1,943 level 1 images, 226 of level 3, 18 of level 5 and 73 of level 7, as well as a film depicting sex with a dead body on his computer between January 2012 and July 2014.
Police officers raided his house on September 19 last year and searched his computers, but no arrest was made until Gilmore contacted officers and went for a voluntary interview on October 17.
In these series of interviews he described how he had been under pressure at work and had become withdrawn from society.
In October 18, 2012, Gilmore was left house-bound after being stabbed in London, the court heard, and he began to search for pornographic websites, initially of young girls aged 18-20.
This soon turned to images of children aged 11 and 12 which Gilmore downloaded, then shared via a peer-to-peer network with paedophiles around the world, the court heard.
After being caught with similar images in 2004 and made the subject of a community order, Gilmore was placed on the sexual offenders' register for five years.
He then went through a period of stability in his life "immersing himself in model airplanes and music", according to James Evan, his defence solicitor.
This was until the knife attack in 2012 which left him with facial scars and mental trauma, the court heard.
He had also suffered a relationship breakdown and increasingly turned to drink as work stresses began to build up.
It was during these alcohol fuelled binges that he began to surf the web for more extreme material.
The court also heard how since moving to Ipswich, Gilmore was the subject of a separate police investigation into further child pornography charges relating to 1,400 pictures of level 1 and 2 category.
Since his arrest in October Gilmore had become even more depressed and even resulted to self-harm – stabbing himself "at least a dozen times" in the scrotum, but didn't seek medical help.
The former Witham resident was given a three-year community order and a supervisory requirement for three years to complete a sexual offender's treatment programme.
He was also made the subject of a sexual prevention order that means he must surrender any Internet devices to police upon request as well as signing on to the sex offenders' register for five years.
