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Former Anglican Priest at Brookfield Andrew Peter Stabback Johns Pleads Guilty to Making and Possessing 1000 Child Porn Images

By Brooke Baskin
The Courier-Mail
February 27, 2015

http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/former-anglican-priest-at-brookfield-andrew-peter-stabback-johns-pleads-guilty-to-making-and-possessing-1000-child-porn-images/story-fnn8dlfs-1227241199292



A FRAIL octogenarian and former Anglican priest has escaped jail after repairs on his laptop unearthed a cache of “sadist” child pornography collected and doctored over four years.

Andrew Peter Stabback Johns, 88, pleaded guilty in the District Court at Brisbane to making and possessing more than 1000 child exploitation images and storing them in a folder on his computer between 2010 and 2014.

Judge Leanne Clare sentenced Johns, who struggled to hear the proceedings and clutched a walking stick, to 15-months behind bars but suspended it immediately for an operational period of two years.

Crown prosecutor Matt Hynes said the case was “unusual” because only three images showed naked boys while the majority were “innocent” images of children that were captioned by Johns “in such a way as to make them child exploitation material”.

Johns took his laptop to a repair shop at Stones Corner and police were alerted to the images on February 26 last year.

Detectives spoke to Johns at his home and he told them he thought boys were attractive and the images were a “masochistic” personal fantasy.

He said Johns told police he had a fantasy to be “spanked” by a boy and had been making such images for 45 years.

Mr Hynes said most of the images on the laptop were innocent photos of children from the internet that had been captioned and “sexualised”.

The court was told there were 263 images in the lowest category of child exploitation and 804 in the highest category, involving sadism.

Barrister Michael Copley QC, instructed by Peter Shields, said Johns was born in England and worked in various careers before applying to join the Anglican Society of St Francis.

He was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1968 and helped to establish a friary at Brookfield, on Brisbane’s west, some years earlier.

Mr Copley said Johns retired at the friary of St Philip at Annerley in 1996, where he continued to live with restrictions imposed by the church authorities on his access to the internet and exposure to children.

He said Johns devoted much of his life to charity and did not appreciate that adding captions to the child images was unlawful.

Mr Copley said Johns had numerous medical conditions and was diagnosed with depression in 2005.

He argued Johns did nothing to “sustain or encourage” the production of child porn images and they were made for his personal viewing.

Judge Clare said Johns sexualised the children by putting their heads onto older bodies and by adding indecent labels or comments.

She said she accepted depression may have impaired Johns’ judgment while time behind bars would be especially hard for him given his age and ill health.

“The circumstances of your conduct are unusual, it stands apart from the other cases because there was no corruption of children and your conduct did not in any sense feed the industry of child exploitation,” she said.

 

 

 

 

 




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