A paedophile who admitted having more than 4,000 indecent images of children on his computer has been spared jail.
David Eggleston, 54, of Seafield Road, was given a community payback order as he was deemed at “low risk of reoffending” by social workers.
At Dundee Sheriff Court, Eggleston admitted that between January 2012 and August 2016, at a house in Seafield Road, he took, or permitted to be taken, or made indecent photographs or pseudo photographs of children.
Of those images, more than 350 were of the most explicit category.
Fiscal depute Charmaine Gilmartin said: “In December 16, Police Scotland received intelligence to suggest that indecent images of children had been uploaded to the internet from the locus.”
She said police went to Eggleston’s home on December 29 2016 and the accused invited them in after they produced the warrant.
A Dell laptop and three external hard drives, along with a black Seagate external hard drive, a USB, a black computer tower and a Maxter hard drive were recovered and taken to police HQ for analysis.
Ms Gilmartin added: “A number of the devices were found to have indecent images of children within unallocated clusters. The images were inaccessible to the accused. However, their presence indicates that at one time they were accessible but they have since been deleted.”
Analysis of the equipment and file sharing software revealed 4,212 indecent images of children and three indecent videos of children.
Of these, 359 were category A and 230 were category B, while the remaining 3,623 were category C.
Solicitor Nicola Brown said Eggleston had cooperated with police and had admitted his guilt at the earliest opportunity. She said the recommendation from the social work report was for a community-based disposal.
Sheriff Alastair Carmichael told Eggleston that although the offence was in the category of a custodial disposal, he was considered to be of a “low risk of reoffending”.
He placed him on a community payback order for two years with 160 hours of unpaid work. He also placed him on the sex offenders register for two years and banned him from owning more than one computer and one mobile telephone.
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