Man is jailed for 21 months for indecent images

Daniel Graham Jordan, 26, admitted three offences when he appeared in the Royal Court.

The court was told that, acting on intelligence, officers went to Jordan’s home in February and seized three mobile telephones for forensic examination. One of them contained indecent images of children. Indecent images of children are graded on a C to A ascending scale in terms of their seriousness and the numbers found in this case were eight, five and 12 respectively.

Some of the images were on the UK Child Abuse Image Database while the rest had needed to be graded manually.

Jordan initially declined to answer questions in interview. He then said he accessed the images via social media.

He said he had looked at them out of morbid curiosity, but denied gaining sexual gratification from it.

There were no relevant matters on his record and his last conviction was for an assault in 2017.

Defending, Advocate Andrew Ayres said his client had admitted the offences in interview and entered guilty pleas at the earliest opportunity. This was not a case where he had downloaded the images for future viewing. They had gone in to some sort of cache on his phone which he could no longer view, he said.

A psychiatric report had found that Jordan had a mental disorder, and his anxiety and depression were moderately severe. There were traces of autism spectrum disorder and he found it difficult to socialise with others in a conventional way.

Jordan tended to distance himself from people and abused alcohol. He had spent more than 10,000 hours playing a multi-user computer game.

In the court’s sentencing remarks, Lt-Bailiff Russell Finch said the evidence against the defendant was strong but the court was bound by law to apply discount to sentence for guilty pleas.

There was mitigation. There was no evidence of widespread distribution, direct abuse of children, or acting for financial gain.

But this was manifestly not a victimless crime, and numerous children all over the world had their lives devastated when they were drawn in to it.

Jordan was jailed for 21 months for the class A images with 10 months and six months, concurrent, for the class B and C respectively. He will subject to an extended sentence licence for two years upon his release from prison, and notification requirements for five years. Forfeiture and destruction of the mobile phone was ordered.