Teacher pleads guilty to child porn charges
Date: May 28, 2008Source: THE AGE
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A Brighton Grammar teacher has pleaded guilty to child pornography charges after downloading thousands of images from the internet including of naked young girls tied up with ropes.
Father-of-three John Newton Hewitt, 49, pleaded guilty in the Melbourne Magistrates Court today to two charges of possessing and transmitting child pornography.
Australian Federal Police found pornographic photographs and videos on Hewitt's laptop, and downloaded to disks stored in a cardboard box, during a search of his home in December last year.
They included naked images of children who appeared to be asleep or unconscious, girls aged between five and 10 stripping, and a video of a girl and boy aged between five and 12 having sex.
A prosecution summary tendered to the court noted that Hewitt had installed software to delete the history of websites he visited, however police forensic analysis revealed 2301 child pornography files on storage devices.
Hewitt, a history, politics and geography teacher, had been downloading the images for up to three years using keywords such as "Lolita" and "naked pre-teens".
He told police he was "extremely embarrassed" about downloading the images but did not believe them to be "exploitative".
Magistrate Peter Couzens bailed Hewitt to appear in the County Court for a pre-sentence hearing on August 11.
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