An offender has been sentenced to 12 months in prison for being in possession of over 2,000 indecent images of children.

Police had executed a warrant at Jonathan Kennaugh’s home in Derby Road, Douglas, last August after receiving information that an IP address linked to the 48-year-old had been downloading and sharing indecent images of children.

Five of his devices were seized and found to contain indecent images of children.

Though immediately pleading guilty, Mr Kennaugh argued that he had inadvertently downloaded the images whilst downloading sci-fi films from a file-sharing website, and that the illegal material had been hidden alongside the movie files.

Sentencing, Deemster Graeme Cook said that this argument was ‘nonsense’, pointing out that Mr Kennaugh had a previous conviction for similar offences from eight years ago.

This was considered an aggravating factor and so Deemster Cook increased the length of this new sentence accordingly.

The images were categorised using the Copine scale, which is used to measure the severity of an image from one to five, with five being the most severe category.

The images found were said to range from one to four (with 63 at level four), but none were level five.

They were downloaded over a span of almost 11 years between June 2010 and October 2021.

Mr Kennaugh will be subject to a Sexual Offences Prevention Order for 10 years, with restrictions on travel and on the electronic devices he is permitted to own, and will also have to remain on the sex offenders register for 10 years.

Defence advocate Stephen Woods argued over the details of the Sexual Offences Prevention Order, seeking for Mr Kennaugh to be allowed to keep his multiple games consoles, and not to be restricted to just one external hard drive because he would not be able to fit his large digital CD collection onto it.

In concluding the sentencing, Deemster Cook stressed to Mr Kennaugh that offenders like him must learn the lesson of the harm that downloading such materials causes to the child victims.

The judge said: ‘Because the children in these images may be damaged for life, and it’s because of people like you looking at them, that there exists a demand for it.’