Man with cache of child porn loses appeal of jail sentence

A Richmond man who was convicted of possessing tens of thousands of images of child pornography has lost his appeal of a one-year jail term.

Alan Kenneth Watson, 72, was arrested after Microsoft advised investigators that child porn had been uploaded to a Microsoft storage service.

In January 2015, police executed a search warrant at Watson’s home.

An expert retained to analyze a small portion of the items seized located more than 220,000 images of child porn. The images included nude photos of children, sex acts committed between children and sex acts between children and adults, including intercourse.

Watson, a retired aircraft mechanic with no prior criminal record, told the police he knew the images were illegal but that he couldn’t stop himself from looking at them. The accused, who has been married for more than 40 years and has children, was convicted and sentenced to one year in prison and three years probation.

On his appeal of the sentence, he argued that the trial judge had made a number of errors in principle that affected the sentence.

Those errors included a claim the judge had wrongly concluded he was addicted to child pornography and the judge erred as to the size and nature of the collection.

But in a ruling released Monday, a three-judge panel of the B.C. Court of Appeal rejected Watson’s appeal. In her reasons for judgment, B.C. Court of Appeal Justice Lauri Ann Fenlon noted the judge made no formal medical diagnosis of addiction, but rather used the term to describe Watson’s collecting and viewing of child porn.

She concluded the sentence was not demonstrably unfit.