KEY POINTS:
A man found with more than 200,000 images from child pornography to bestiality on several computers was today jailed for two years.
The sentence was thought to be amongst the most severe imposed by a New Zealand court for the possession of objectionable material .
Bruce Albert Wigzell, a 35-year-old Porirua truck driver, was sentenced to two years' prison when he appeared in Wellington District Court today, after pleading guilty to 30 charges of possessing objectionable images.
Last December, the Internal Affairs department searched Wigzell's Titahi Bay residence, after Australian officials became aware of an email he sent requesting pornographic images of children.
More than 200,000 still images, video files, movie files and animations sexualising children as young as five were found on five computers and four hard-drives.
The images were meticulously filed and categorised.
Prosecutor Saar Cohen-Ronen told the court the sheer number of images and Wigzell's previous conviction for the same type of offending in 2005 warranted the most severe punishment ever handed out in this country.
"I can hardly imagine a case more serious than this," he said.
Mr Cohen-Ronen said no other case like this had been tested before in a New Zealand court since the maximum sentence had been extended from two years to five years jail in 2005.
He asked Judge Bruce Davidson to consider a jail term in the context of harsher British sentencing, where the maximum sentence was also five years jail.
Wigzell's lawyer, Craig Smith, said his client should not be made an example of as his offending was the result of mental illness and social isolation.
Judge Davidson said sentences in New Zealand were likely to fall in line with British sentencing.
However, he did not think it appropriate for him to impose such a sentence as it was the role of the appeal court to set sentence tariffs.
The judge imposed a number of conditions to take effect after Wigzell's sentence was complete, including undertaking counselling, not accessing the internet and not having unsupervised contact with children under the age of 16.
Internal Affairs Department Deputy Secretary Keith Manch the sentence said the sentence was a further warning to those involved in such offending that the courts were coming down harder than in the past.
"Wigzell was undergoing counselling for his earlier offending when he started accessing objectionable material on the internet again," Mr Manch said.
- NZPA
