Disgraced former deputy police commissioner Jevon McSkimming was sentenced to nine months home detention. Photo: RNZ / Mark Papalii
When Jevon McSkimming was sentenced on Wednesday, his lawyer and the judge told the court he was the first person in New Zealand to be prosecuted for simply viewing objectionable material.
The former deputy police commissioner was sentenced to nine months home detention at the Wellington District Court, after pleading guilty to the possession of child sexual exploitation and bestiality material in November.
Judge Tim Black and defence lawyer Letizea Ord both told the court during the sentencing they understood this was the first time someone had been prosecuted for simply viewing material online, rather than downloading it or distributing it.
"Perhaps one of the unique features of this case is that none of the images were downloaded or stored in any way," Ord said.
However, she said it was accepted that viewing - particularly his clicking on some 160 images - was "akin to downloading from a sentencing perspective".
Judge Black noted in case law there was a "limited pool of decisions which involve possession".
"Most of the decisions involve some other more serious offending, such as importation or distribution."
Victims advocate Claire Buckley told RNZ the law hadn't kept up with technology and people no longer had to download material to have it at their fingertips.
"I would like to see that line between viewing, versus downloading and sharing, be eradicated, those three things all put together, because if you're viewing it, you are absolutely contributing to the creation of it."
Viewing it still generated demand, she said, and over time the searches tended to become more extreme.
"If you start off on AI-generated images, eventually that's not going to cut it anymore, and you're going to go looking for slightly more realistic, and something harder-core, by which time you are generating harm because you're generating demand for really objectionable material which requires abuse of people in order to create it."
The evidence showed people tended to make the shift from AI-generated content to reality, but very few made the jump from watching content to acting out those things themselves, she said.
However, the harm was still very real for victims of objectionable material.
Parents of children who had been filmed for this purpose found it incredibly triggering, Buckley said.
"It's like 'that happened to my kid, and now, this guy could be looking at those images.'
"Once those images go around, you can never get rid of them, not really. And so the families who have been harmed by this kind of thing are harmed over and over and over again.
"They weren't [downloaded or shared] in this particular case, but that's what frequently happens, and people don't separate it in their minds when they're a victim."
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