An elderly child pornography aficionado must be wondering where Supreme Court of Canada Justice Mary Moreau is when you really need her.
After all, it was Moreau who wrote the widely condemned Supreme Court decision decrying that a one-year mandatory minimum in jail for possessing child pornography, uh, violated the Charter. Conjured hypothetical scenarios created this absurd leap.
To nearly universal condemnation and global mockery.
60,000 CHILD PORN IMAGES
Which brings us to William Lee Tate. To call Tate, 82, a fan of sickening, violent child pornography would be a gross understatement.
CTV News revealed last week that Tate — an American draft dodger who came here during the Vietnam War — pleaded guilty earlier this year to just one count of possessing child pornography and one count of transmitting child pornography in the B.C. Supreme Court in Victoria.
He got dinged with the incarceration equivalent of a nothing burger: Just two years less a day in jail.
But wait. Let’s not be too harsh on the old boy. Surely, it was all a terrible mistake. Can’t Justice Mary Moreau don her child porn defender cape for this guy?
Here’s what was on his devices…
‘“These were ultimately found to contain 60,491 unique images confirmed by two police officers reviewing them to meet the Code’s definition of ‘child pornography’ and 2,272 unique videos, also constituting ‘child pornography.’ The total run time of all the videos amounted to 5,742 hours and 54 minutes,” Justice Gareth Morley wrote.
‘CRUELLEST’ ‘MALEVOLENT’
“They depict violent sexual abuse of prepubescent girls, some of them infants … The depiction of the suffering is presumably part of the appeal for the viewer. The images and videos show human nature at its cruellest and most malevolent, directed against the most vulnerable.”
U.S. investigators identified an IP address that led them to the twisted old fella. Detectives determined that their man was sharing a tidal wave of child sexual abuse material on a peer-to-peer site.
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His lawyer requested a conditional sentence of two years, served in the community, but under house arrest. Good try! The Crown argued a jolt in the slammer was necessary. Yes, two years less a day followed by three years of probation will do it.
To his credit — am I writing this? — Judge Morley torpedoed the conditional sentence gambit. When we’re talking about the sexual abuse of children, well, nope.
‘HORRIFICALLY VIOLENT’
Tate’s proclivities weren’t of the Sears catalogue level; the depraved material in his possession was “horrifically violent,” and there was a mountain of it.
“We may not know who Mr. Tate’s victims were, but there were many, possibly thousands, of them. Girls were tortured and robbed of their childhoods and their fundamental right to sexual integrity. Mr. Tate may not have touched or filmed the victims, but he participated in their exploitation and enslavement. Their torture was for his benefit and of the benefit of others like him, including those he was actively ‘sharing’ with,” Morley wrote.
“Each of those images and videos depicts abuse that will have effects for decades.”
‘LYING TO HIMSELF’
In classic pedo style, Tate underplayed his “culpability” and just how rotten his filthy soul is. Why, he claimed, he didn’t think the disgusting material in his possession was illegal. And besides, it was, uh, for research purposes.
Tate laughingly proclaimed he was only interested in sex with adult women.
“He is either lying to himself or to the court,” the judge wrote.
He did not have a criminal record. But William Lee Tate does indeed have an illness.
And no amount of judicial gymnastics will ever change that.
bhunter@postmedia.com
@HunterTOSun
