Teacher accused of downloading child pornography
A teacher accused of downloading child porn had illegal images saved on his laptop in folders labelled “innocent”, “nerds”, “incest” and “panties”, a jury was told yesterday.
Guildford Grammar School teacher Jeffery Jay McKinnell allegedly had 3009 child exploitation images on his laptop when he was arrested in May 2016.
Giving evidence in Mr McKinnell’s District Court trial yesterday, digital evidence examiner Ryan Baxter said illegal pictures were found in various folders and subfolders on Mr McKinnell’s computer.
Names of the folders ranged from “innocent”, “new mature” and “braces” to “incest”, “teenies” and offensive terms.
Some of the folders allegedly contained hundreds of child exploitation images while others had one or two stored in them.
Mr McKinnell claims he never meant to download “kiddie porn” but says some illegal photos crept into his collection when he was downloading big amounts of adult pornography.
He told police he categorised his porn and would go through the images and delete any “iffy” material when he had time.
Mr Baxter testified Mr McKinnell deleted files from his laptop on only three occasions over the past two years.
He said some of the deleted files contained the commonly used acronym PTHC, short for pre-teen hardcore, in the name.
Others allegedly included the words “paedoland”, “child sex” and “bestiality”.
During his police interview, Mr McKinnell allegedly said he would put any potentially dodgy images into a folder called “specs”, which was short for suspect, before reviewing them.
Mr Baxter told the jury there was no sign of file deletion when it came to the “specs” folder Mr McKinnell had referred to.
The court was closed to the public yesterday when the jury was shown a sample of the child exploitation material allegedly found on the laptop.
Included in the sample were photographs of children bound and gagged, and in underwear posing provocatively.
Mr McKinnell’s laptop contained about 270,000 images and 75 per cent of them were pornographic.
In his opening address, defence lawyer Anthony Elliott told the jurors they should not rush to judgment, no matter how they felt about pornography.
He admitted Mr McKinnell had various child porn images on his laptop but said his client always endeavoured to delete illegal photographs when he became aware of them.
This article originally appeared on New Idea.
