NEW GLASGOW – A former teacher was sentenced to two weeks in jail last Friday after child pornography was found on his computer.
Jim Wadden, 67, of Westville was sentenced in New Glasgow provincial court to the mandatory minimum set out by Parliament – 14 days in the Burnside Correctional Facility, followed by 18 months of probation – for possessing child pornography.
Special Crown attorney Craig Botterill said that the images were found on Wadden’s computer last April after he brought it to a local computer repair business complaining that he was unable to burn CDs and saying that he was losing documents on the computer.
While there, Wadden chatted with an employee, asking them if they’d seen a report on child pornography recently in the newspaper.
“He said, ‘I’d never look at that sort of thing and the like’,” Botterill explained. “It was a case of methinks (he) doth protest too much, and when he left, the employee took a close look at his computer.”
The employee contacted New Glasgow Police to look into the matter and the computer was seized and sent for forensic analysis.
The computer contained three pornographic images – two copies of one shot – that were very graphic in nature. The images, of 10- or 11-year-old girls, showed one child naked with her legs spread, while the other image showed three young girls naked, performing oral sex on each other.
Botterill says the case is somewhat unusual, simply based on the low number of images on the computer.
“If a person has an interest in child pornography, you usually see them having thousands of images,” he explained.
This was the first criminal incident for the former teacher, who appeared in court with his family to support him.
Wadden was given the minimum sentence by Judge Theodore Tax. Because this was a sex crime, it could not go through adult diversion and the option of serving house arrest is also not available in this sort of case, Botterill explained.
Wadden was also ordered to submit to a DNA order and will be on the sex offender registry for 10 years.
He was also ordered to forfeit his computer.