A paedophile caught with more than 1,000 depraved pictures of sexually abused children on his PlayStation gaming console has been handed a community sentence.
Jonathan McGregor, 50, was made subject to social work supervision for two years and will remain on the sex offenders’ register for the same period.
In addition to child abuse images on his PlayStation, a court heard McGregor downloaded photographs onto his mobile phone showing youngsters being subjected to sickening sexual acts.
Police raided his home in West Lothian, after receiving information that the unique IP address had been used to access indecent images, Livingston Sheriff Court heard.
Officers raided his then address at Harestanes, Armadale, on 10 March 2020 and searched his room.
They took away a number of items including a mobile phone and a PlayStation.
Both devices were forensically examined by police experts and the indecent images were found.
McGregor was interviewed and admitted that it was his bedroom that had been searched and that the items taken away for police examination belonged to him.
His mobile phone was found to contain four category ‘A’ videos – deemed the most severe – and 31 category ‘C’ images of children.
On the PlayStation, which is also a storage device, police found a hoard of still images including 74 in category ‘A’; 76 category ‘B’ and 1,098 category ‘C’.
McGregor, 50, who now lives in Mount Pleasant, Bushmills, Northern Ireland, pled guilty to possessing indecent images of children between 18 October 2019 and 3 March 2020.
His not guilty pleas to taking indecent images of children and possessing extreme porn of adults performing sexual acts on animals were accepted by the Crown.
Iain Smith, defending, said his client had admitted possession of the images from the outset and had now moved from Scotland back to Northern Ireland.
He said: “He’s remorseful. He accepts it and regrets what happened.”
Sheriff Martin Edington highlighted that McGregor would be made subject to a sexual offences prevention order by the authorities in Northern Ireland.
He said he took into consideration that the accused had no previous convictions for similar offences, with his record only showing two relatively minor road traffic convictions from 2004.
He imposed a two year supervision order and said the accused would be subject to the notification requirements under the Sexual Offences Act 2003 for two years.
