A man has been jailed for six months after police discovered tens of thousands of child abuse images on his computer equipment.
Police in West Yorkshire arrested Brighouse supermarket baker Lee Blackwell in October 2014 after they were tipped-off by officers in Canada who were investigating the worldwide sale of DVDs.
Bradford Crown Court heard that when police examined computer hard drives seized from Blackwell’s home they found more than 150,000 photos and videos on them.
Prosecutor Alisha Kaye said the volume of material meant the police could only check a proportion of it. Some of the images and films involved children as young as six and the material included scenes of sexual activity.
Blackwell, 46, of Cross Street, admitted possession of the material. Miss Kaye said Blackwell told officers he was shocked at the volume of images.
Barrister Stephen Wood, for Blackwell, said the defendant had copied some images from one disc to another, but it was accepted that there were approaching 34,000 images of children with the vast majority of the being in the lowest category of seriousness.
Mr Wood said there was no evidence of Blackwell being involved in any distribution of images, but added:”The defendant understands every single one of those 34,000 images involves a victim. He is ashamed of what he has done.”
Judge Jonathan Rose told Blackwell that every child that had an indecent photograph taken of them had been abused and by looking at such images he was perpetuating the abuse.
“You are the market and you cannot evade responsibility for abusing children by sitting in a room and watching and saying I never went anywhere near that child,” he told Blackwell.
“You sought this material out and then you continued to do so clearly over a fairly substantial period of time to accumulate all of those images.”
Blackwell will have to register as a sex offender with the police for the next five years and he will also be subject to a sexual harm prevention order which restricts his use of the internet for five years.
