A 33-year-old Dunedin repeat offender was today jailed for 18 months for distributing child sexual abuse images.
William John George, unemployed, of Port Chalmers, pleaded guilty to 10 charges of distributing an objectionable publication and was sentenced in Dunedin District Court.
The Department of Internal Affairs said George was warned in 1997 and convicted in 2001 for trading objectionable material.
In June 2006 an Internal Affairs investigator discovered George was again making child sexual abuse material available via peer-to-peer software on the internet.
The inspector downloaded 26 files from George's shared folder, 16 of which were objectionable.
No objectionable files were found on George's computer because he had used a cleanup programme. But there was evidence that a shared folder had contained a significant number of image and video clip files featuring the sexual abuse of children.
Internal Affairs deputy secretary Keith Manch said the case showed that the department could overcome the most sophisticated attempts to conceal offending.
