An Abbotsford man has been sentenced to 20 months in prison and two years’ probation for three child pornography offences.
Martin Gregory Smith, 52, was previously convicted of possessing, accessing and sharing child porn. He was sentenced Monday in B.C. Supreme Court in Chilliwack.
Smith was charged in July 2008 after police executed a search warrant at the home he owned in Abbotsford with his wife.
Authorities investigating Internet crimes against children had traced downloaded child pornography images and videos to a computer in the Smith home, and alerted the Abbotsford Police Department (APD).
The APD then seized two computers – a desktop and a laptop – which were later found to contain hundreds of pornographic images of children as young as four and five years old.
In his ruling last December, Justice Neill Brown said an APD investigator reviewed almost 13,000 files of the 94,000 that had been extracted from the computers.
Of those, almost 1,200 were found to meet the legal criteria for child porn, while about 1,400 were categorized as “child-related” (depicting children in explicit clothing and/or positions).
Another 900 were labelled as erotica (kids in attire such as bathing suits).
In addition, almost 1,000 photos and videos were found to have been distributed over LimeWire, a software program in which people can share music, video and photo files with other users.
About 30 per cent of those were considered child porn, while the rest were categorized as “child-related” and erotica.
Smith was also found to have searched and accessed child porn over the Internet, with an investigator estimating that 90 per cent of the computers’ search history under his account was related to the topic.
During Smith’s trial, defence lawyer Ondine Snowdon had argued that although child pornography was found on computers in the Smith home, there was no direct evidence that he had knowingly acquired or shared the data, as both he and his wife had access to the computers.
The two had separate accounts, and no child pornography was found on his wife’s account.
Brown said he found it “highly speculative and contrary to common sense” to suggest that Smith’s wife had accessed his account and downloaded child pornography, given the number of images that had been stored in the three-year period before his arrest.
Brown said her only motive for doing so would be to frame him, and he found there was no evidence to support this theory.
