Looks like it wouldnt have made a difference then with the SOR, although would have prevented all the court toing and froing and solicitors fees. But the worst part was the visits from the omu so fair enough.

A caution will get you two years on the SOR. That is what the law dictates, so there is no discretion. The discretion is in how the police decide to proceed. I remember about twenty years ago that there was a ruling that if the number of images was under sixteen, then it should be dealt with by a caution. There may well have been other rulings since then, of course.

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If you are to punish a man retributively you must injure him. If you are to reform him you must improve him. And men are not improved by injuries. (George Bernard Shaw)

Thanks for replies folks. No idea tbh, it was the folk at Stop it Now that told me that. doesnt matter, ive been off the sor for over 2 years now.

I know someone who was found to have 1 - 2 images, I am unaware of the category though but was given a caution which I believe lasts for 2 years?
I think over all it would all come down to the force in which is investigating the case and how big their ego is.

I disagree. You'd probably have got probation/rehabilitation course and 5 years on SOR in England. It's what I got. 2 Years SOR is what you get for a police caution.

So far as I'm aware, Scotland follows the same sentencing guidelines as England and Wales in these cases. The decision to issue a caution is made by the police though. 

I'm in Scotland, I had 1 Cat C image and got 2 years on the SOR. Im not complaining btw but I was told at the time that if i was in england i'd likely have recieved a caution.

The sentencing for these offences has reduced over the last 10 years. In the early days of the internet, custodial sentences were commonplace. That was because the authorities believed these men were all contact offenders, offending in a different way. Over time, as the numbers grew and grew, it became more and more obvious to the judges, that the men were law abiding citizens, who had become porn addicts, because of the internet offering such easy access to these images. They were not going to commit contact offences, so they could be managed in the community. It also became obvious that locking them all up would overwhelm the already over crowded prison system, with people who posed no danger to the public.  

There is an odd piece in the sentencing guidelines, about the relative numbers of different category images. If the person has say 100 images, of which 90 are cat C and 10 are cat A, then they can be treated as Cat C for sentencing, because the overwhelming majority of the images fall into Cat C. On the other hand, if you only have 1 Cat A, and nothing else. then 100% of your 'collection' is cat A, which would attract a higher sentence.

Obviously in this case, being a police officer makes it worse, because they are in a position of trust. There doesn't seem to be any obvious reason for judges to choose suspended sentences over community orders, in these cases, even though this can drastically affect time spent on the SOR. As for cautions, these are seemingly only used where no images are found on the person's devices.

Conditional cautions, which contain requirements to attend treatment for example, have been recommended by those at the top of the CPS and the NCA, but these recommendations have not filtered down to the front line. I guess that's because it is too easy to get convictions when you know most people will plead guilty.

I continue to see the press report on many individuals for the same offense and still only get given 5 - 7 years on the SHPO, some of which have been found to have 50 - 100s of Cat A, including ex police officers. The system is a joke and the only people it protects are those who are "entrusted" to enforce it. I would honestly say it is a lottery and falls on how good your solicitors are and if you can pay them enough. You didn't mention if he had any cat B or C, if he literally only had one video and still got that kind of sentence I would definitely say it is way to much. A caution could have been enough surely? Seems to me a conviction was pushed partly because of his job and because its a point for the arresting officer for an easy conviction.

Rather than start a new thread... I've just seen a story of a (now ex) police officer, sentenced to 10 months, suspended for two years, with a 10-year SHPO. He had one Cat A video... one. No mention of any Bs/Cs. Obviously losing his job and being in the paper will severely impact what happens going forward but... it just all seems relentless. Is the sentence too much, is it because of his job, is it just a lottery. 

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Fighting or Accepting - its difficult to know which is right and when.

I'm tempted to quote the carving above the entrance of the Springfield Courthouse in The Simpsons. "With liberty and justice for some"....

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If you are to punish a man retributively you must injure him. If you are to reform him you must improve him. And men are not improved by injuries. (George Bernard Shaw)

Looks like it is. England and Wales only appear to publish judgements which the trial judge deems "to be of interest". 

Finding out when a case is being heard is even harder. I'm trying to find out the date of a High Court case for criminal contempt I'm interested in that was referred by the Court of Appeal last November. I was told that they wouldn't tell me the date and that I need to check the listings. These are only published the night before. I've been checking every day for the last 9 months. Nothing.

Of course, if you register for some of the paid for services, such as Casemine or Law Pages, you can access more information. 

Hmm, maybe its a Scottish thing. You can access details of a court case and the outcome via the Scottish Courts and Tribunals service. Depending on the case and your relationship to those involved some items may be redacted and you might need to declare why you want access to the information. I just assumed England and Wales would have something similar.

https://www.scotcourts.gov.uk/search-judgments/about-judgments

You can also access some here too: https://www.judiciary.scot/home/sentences-judgments/sentences-and-opinions

Without going into too many details, I've used the service before years ago when someone I knew went to court. After it was all done I phoned up the court that handled their sentencing and asked for what the sentence was and they told me over the phone. As courts are typically public I could've theoretically just walked up and sat in the public bench and watched if I wanted. So it does ring true in my personal experience, otherwise I wouldn't have known about it.

Much like yourself though - I also had some statements read out that were... Twisted out of their original intent, shall we say... That was obviously gobbled up by the local papers.

This is not actually that true. I have on several occasions tried to get the results of a hearing from the court and been told that they do not make them available to the public. I even contacted the Attorney General's office for details of a case, and they refused to tell me anything.

This is 100% wrong. I have the MoJ guidance on it, but how many actually follow up? Certainly not local journalists who, if there are any, are paid a pittance. 

In my case, a statement was read out in open court by the CPS barrister that was totally 100% wrong, but it was printed in the local papers as fact. The press did nothing wrong. It was qualified privilege.

So yes, even with reporting you shouldn't believe everything that you read in the press. But sometimes, it's not their fault.

Sadly my cynicism jumps in here where I believe the general Joe Public generally wouldn't care about his history. All they'll still see is "Bad Paedo Man Not In Jail! Police Protect Paedos!", I've seen it before in my local paper a few years ago where someone was arrested for an images offence, part of the papers did report about previous mental health issues and a lot of the comments were basically "Well I have mental health problems and I don't go around abusing kids!".

I'd say that would spill over onto the "at risk of being in abused in prison" bit too where I imagine most of the replies would be "Good, he deserves to be".

As for the general newspaper reporting thing - I've kind of always leaned on they shouldn't be reported on (not just sex offences but in general). By all means say "A 30 year old man was sentenced today to blah blah blah after being arrested and charged for blah blah blah". Court records are generally open to the public. If the public is that interested then they can seek out further information on who the person is via the court system. I'm sure you'll find the vast majority won't as the public are only interested if they're told about it.

I think your point is slightly different to my own. There is an argument, that this particular case should never have been reported in the press at all, because the perpetrator was so vulnerable. But it was reported and his photo was also published, making him a target for vigilantes. That should not have been allowed to happen. The judge could have ordered a complete ban on all press reporting, but they didn't. Here are some of the headlines.

https://www.worcesternews.co.uk/news/18858621.worcestershire-parents-outrage-child-rapist-avoids-jail/
https://www.kidderminstershuttle.co.uk/news/18925911.unduly-lenient-sentence-kidderminster-child-rapist-reviewed/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8843789/Mother-devastated-paedophile-walked-free-court-raping-five-year-old-daughter.html
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/mums-fury-after-paedophile-who-22851603

I'm saying, that given this has been reported in the press, then the public should be given all the details and not just some of the details. Not one of them mentions the background to the case; the fact that he has learning difficulties, or that he was abused himself. Not one of them mentions the fact that the judge decided not to jail him, because he was at risk of being further abused, in prison. 

I take your point, about the average reader having a very short attention span, so the headlines need to sum up the story, in a different way. How about: 'Judge shows mercy, to man with learning difficulties', for example?

I don't agree that journalists don't have time to put the extra detail in. It took me less than an hour to find the court judgement online. All they needed to say, was that he was spared jail because he had a mental health condition and was considered vulnerable. 

I do agree that no sexual offences should be reported in the press, because of the risk to public safety, caused by vigilantes. There are cases, like the one of John Leslie, which demonstrate how just being accused of an offence can destroy somebody, never mind being convicted. But to go down that road, brings its own problems. Should we told that Harvey Weinstein or Jeffrey Epstein have been prosecuted? What about Rolf Harris? What about all the MPs charged with sexual offences? Is it nobody's business what they did? What about Prince Andrew? Should we have the right to know about what he is alleged to have done?

Drawing that line, between what is in the public interest and what the public are interested in, would not be easy. Understanding why people commit offences and educating the public about that, is my preferred solution, because people might care, if they knew more about why these things happen, but that can be difficult, because these cases are often complex.

If you put your mind back to before we here got involved in this world of chaos and misery that we've found ourselves in, I doubt you'd have been advocating for more detail of such situations.

As someone who was reported in the press, the last thing I want is more detail about the worst day of my life on record for anyone to read in a few clicks. It's severely affecting my ability to move on. To this day, I believe it's nobody's business about what I did, which is why I get so frustrated with these rules about SHPOs and disclosure. Yet, day after day, people who are ill-prepared to deal with that are forced into the spotlight by being reported on and creating nothing but more difficulty in already testing situations.
As a side note, I met one girl years ago who thrust herself into the world of celebrity, she had to deal with press, idiots on social media, the lot, she hadn't done anything wrong and it was too much and she's no longer with us. The full effects of being in the press are not known, incomprehensible and, at the moment, lack any accountability. 

I watched the first of those filmed sentences, saved for complex cases I think, and they show how much of a chaotic build-up there was to the main offence and more often than not stem back many years and/or to childhood. Local papers and even agency writers don't have the resources to get fully engrained into each case day after day. It's also part of their job to write in a way that's manageable for their audience. That usually means simplification of complex things. Then add to that, Daily Fail for example, adding political or scaremongering wording to tap into government agenda or playing to biases of their audiences, to every single story... any complex story becomes so messy. Add to that the attention spans of people are getting shorter, thanks to the "generation overload" that we live in, and make quicker judgments based on headlines (nevermind getting past the first couple of paragraphs) because there's so many ways to get news now than ever before, instantaneously and for free. To get a full reflection you're getting into documentary territory and those cannot be done in one day. So, outside of those specifically affected, as far as more and more detail on one case is concerned, as I said, the general public don't care (even when they think they might).

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Fighting or Accepting - its difficult to know which is right and when.

We don't know all the details, because the press simply do not report them. There is another very unusual sentence here.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/kidderminster-child-rapist-has-his-sentence-increased

The original sentence was reviewed and increased, but not by much, so it cannot be that one judge was acting out of step with everyone else. There has to be an explanation for a sentence like this and it is the job of the journalists to let the public know what the reason was. But when you look at how it was reported, every news outlet went with the same story, about the 'outrage' because of a 'soft' sentence, as they know that this will generate the most interest. Even the govt only reported the sentence, not the reason for it.

However. I have managed to track down the court of appeals judgement.

https://www.casemine.com/judgement/uk/5ff7faea2c94e03f0ca6b0a9

When you read it, a lot of things become clear. The journalists should hang their heads in shame, for not reporting the full facts of this case, and many others like it. I think that the public would care, if only they were told the truth. The courts have started showing live sentencings recently, but very few people, including members of the press, bother to listen to them and instead they only make comments about the 'headline' sentence. 

There was a guy a bit younger than me on my SOTP course and he'd had sex with a girl under 16, he got a community order and five years on the register... and he kept his public-facing job. Most of us here got much worse than that and had no contact with anyone. The fact is though, nobody cares. We don't know all the details of each individual case and even if we did the sentences still probably wouldn't match up.

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Fighting or Accepting - its difficult to know which is right and when.

Also, as it was in the USA, there is no accounting for local laws and sentencing guidelines, and also the attitude of the individual judge.

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If you are to punish a man retributively you must injure him. If you are to reform him you must improve him. And men are not improved by injuries. (George Bernard Shaw)