A Perth man caught with a sickening stash of child pornography avoided jail yesterday.
Richard Carcary (40), of Glenshee Crescent, admitted having 528 indecent images of children in his possession between November 20, 2007, and November 20, 2008 10 classified as being of the most serious nature (level five).
Police raided the tradesman’s property after a teenage girl, then under 16, found the explicit images when accessing his computer in February 2008.
The girl was initially too scared to report her findings but plucked up the courage a number of months later after speaking to a family member.
Perth Sheriff Court heard that some of the photographs and video clips showed horrendous sex acts involving boys and girls as young as eight.
Carcary sat shame-faced in the dock as the details were recalled by Sergeant David Black, of Tayside Police, who was involved in the investigation.
Sgt Black said, “We were asked in early January 2009 to examine some computer equipment that had been seized.
“We examined a large number of discs and computer equipment and found suspect material on two separate items a compact disc and USB thumb-drive memory stick.”
He added, “The majority of the images found were still photographs but there were also 16 video clips with three and a half hours of footage.”
Ten of the images found were of level five severity, eight were classified as level four, one was level three, 44 were level two and 465 were level one.Offender’s “serious difficulties”Advocate James MacDonald said his client accepted full responsibility for the offence, had pleaded guilty at the earliest opportunity and had co-operated with police and the authors of social inquiry, community service and psychiatric reports.
Mr MacDonald said Carcary had been experiencing “serious difficulties” in his personal life and had to care for his alcoholic father.
His job as a ventilation fitter was the “one stable factor in his life” and the position would remain open if he avoided a custodial sentence.
Sheriff Robert McCreadie sentenced Carcary to three years’ probation and placed him on the sex offenders register for the same period.
The sheriff told him, “This was a borderline case and you could have been given a custodial sentence. However, relatively speaking, a low number of images were found and there has been good co-operation.
“The reports also indicate you have shown a high level of remorse and there is little chance of re-offending.”
Sheriff McCreadie included three conditions in the probation order that Carcary attends the Tay Project, that he does not own or seek to access a computer or use the internet in any form and that he has no unsupervised contact with boys or girls under the age of 16.