Kenneth Warren Hawkins, of Invercargill, appeared before Judge Duncan Harvey in the Invercargill District Court yesterday to be convicted on 18 charges of possession of offensive material between 2011 and 2021.
Judge Harvey said that of the 42 images and video, 21 were in the highest category A, nine in category B and 12 in category C.
“The 21 Category A images are extreme, they’re disgusting and they’re almost as bad as you could get.”
Court documents show that between 1999 and 2001, Hawkins was sentenced to 11 years in prison after pleading guilty to four counts of rape, 12 charges of sexual assault through unlawful sexual intercourse and nine charges of indecent assault. The victims of the violation were two children, then 6 to 8 years old.
According to the police summary, Hawkins used Wi-Fi to send two images from one of his email addresses to another during his hospitalization at Southland Hospital last year.
The email warned Yahoo! Inc, who then passed the information on to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, based in the United States.
Last year, a police search warrant was executed at Hawkins’ home in Invercargill and most of the material was found in system files known as thumb caches and a computer’s Unallocated space.
This indicated that the defendant had taken steps to remove material and used applications to access material that may not be readily available to our everyday computer user, all in an effort to “clean up after itself” said the summary.
When questioned by the police, Hawkins admitted to viewing images daily and said he also searched the Internet for stories about sex with children.
He admitted that he had entered the dark web for such stories in the past, the summary said.
“In explanation, the defendant used his deteriorating health as an excuse and further stated that he knew what he was doing was wrong.”
But yesterday, Judge Harvey said Hawkins told a writer of a pre-sentence report that the reason he looked at the footage was not for sexual pleasure, but to understand the insult he had experienced as a child.
Judge Harvey did not believe this explanation was true.
The crime began just a year after his parole ended after serving his previous sentence for several sexual offenses against children, and despite completing a child abuse treatment program, Judge Harvey said.
He described the offense as appalling and abhorrent.
“The damage done to these children is simply incalculable.
“Anything less than jail time would just send the wrong message.”
Judge Harvey sentenced Hawkins to 14 months in prison. His name would automatically be included in the register of child sex offenders. The judge also ordered destruction of the images.