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Michael Cavanagh, 72, pleaded guilty in February
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Amassing a vast child pornography collection should land a Calgary senior a 2 1/2-year prison term, a prosecutor argued Tuesday.
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Crown lawyer Tara Hayes said despite Michael Cavanagh’s advanced age, a period of time in a federal penitentiary was warranted.
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Cavanagh, 72, pleaded guilty in February to possession of child pornography in connection with a collection of unlawful material found on his personal computer and a hard drive during a search of his senior’s residence last Sept. 29.
According to a statement of admitted facts, read in by Hayes following Cavanagh’s Feb. 15 guilty plea, police conducted a search of his 34 St. N.W. apartment on that date.
“During the course of the search, multiple computer devices and digital storage media were seized,” Hayes said.
A forensic examination was done on Cavanagh’s laptop and a hard drive connected to the computer.
“The forensic examiner determined that the accused had been using an Internet-based program to acquire child pornography from the Internet.”
The search uncovered 30,261 images of child pornography and eight videos on the laptop and 183,915 images and 2,504 videos on the hard drive.
Some of the images were inaccessible, meaning they had been previously stored on the device and deleted, or viewed but never actually saved.
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“While some of these images were inaccessible, there were 102,826 images of child pornography saved in a folder,” Hayes said.
Aggravating factors justify prison term: prosecutor
The prosecutor suggested to Justice Ken McLeod that a multitude of aggravating factors justified a 30-month sentence for the offender.
Hayes noted Cavanagh’s collection focused on prepubescent children, primarily males and ranged from boys in various states of undress to adults sexually assaulting kids.
She said while three prior convictions on Cavanagh’s record — a break and enter in 1969, an impaired driving in 1983 and a theft in 1984 — weren’t of concern, a 1991 sexual assault involving a young boy was.
“Mr. Cavanagh has had a long-standing interest ‘watershed’ case on child sexual offences finding such crimes are ‘profoundly harmful’ to children.
“The possession of child pornography is child abuse,” Hayes said.
Such crimes provide a “clear and present danger to children around the world.”
‘It is not a victimless crime’
She said the Supreme Court was clear that incidents of child exploitation must garner serious punishments greater than the conditional sentence expected to be proposed by defence lawyer Iretiolu Shittu.
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“The offence the court is dealing with today is one courts have been directed to deal with seriously.”
And Hayes said just because the images were previously produced, that didn’t lessen the impact on the victims.
“Even though the victims are remote it is not a victimless crime,” she said.
Victims suffer a lifetime of grief, she said, knowing their sexual abuse is being shared and viewed by pedophiles like Cavanagh over and over again.
Because of the length of Hayes’ submissions, McLeod won’t hear from Shittu until the case is back before him on Aug. 22.
Cavanagh remains at liberty in the interim.
KMartin@postmedia.com
On Twitter: @KMartinCourts
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